Scrubbed
by stargatecat
Summary: Most of SG1's missions don't go to plan and, despite what we see on screen, not every mission gets completed. Here are a series of anecdotes of missions that, for one reason or another, had to be scrubbed and in which at least one team member winds up in the infirmary. May contain strong language and adult themes.
1. A is for Anaphylaxis

Scrubbed - A is for Anaphylaxis

He should have known when he got up that morning that it was not going to be a good day for his allergies. Spring never was, but, with some exceptions, Daniel had normally been able to escape the Colorado pollen off world. Today, however, seemed particularly exceptional.

The fact that the itchy, gritty feeling in his eyes and the springtime congestion his allergy meds barely touched didn't begin to dissipate when they emerged from the wormhole's event horizon should have been a big red flag. The aerial MALP had shown the existence of a spectacular temple-looking ruin less than a mile from the gate, however, and he had been too excited to check it out to pay any attention.

"Good morning, campers! It's going to be a beautiful day here on P12X-597. It's a balmy 85 degrees, the sun is shining, the flowers are blooming, and…." Daniel interrupted Jack with a rather triumphant sneeze.

"…and the Daniel is sneezing. Let's move out. Carter, lead the way." Rolling his eyes, Daniel followed Sam through the grassy clearing around the gate to the overgrown path at the edge of the tree line.

The walk to the temple was uneventful. There were no signs of intelligent life, no current inhabitants of the planet to interact with, save for the twittering of a few birds in the surrounding flora. The temple itself was quite large, giant oaken pillars suspending an ornately decorated façade and a thatched roof with what looked like a sizable hole in the middle from which more trees had begun to grow. Whatever had caused the destruction must have happened a long time ago.

Taking his camcorder from his pack, Daniel filmed the outside of the temple while Teal'c and Jack explored the perimeter. Then, he followed Sam inside. The outer area of the inner part of the temple was also quite ornate. Large carvings of what looked like horses and riders poked out from an overgrowth of vines dotted with tiny golden flowers. The giant oak pillars lined the inside, leading the way to an even more detailed back wall. Still filming, Daniel stepped around the foliage, echoing Sam's footsteps toward a small door behind which, Daniel supposed, was the inner sanctum of the temple. He was about to radio Jack with their current position when he heard him come up behind him.

"Looks like Jumanji in here." Daniel paused in pursuit of Sam and smiled back at Jack, about to comment when Sam's "Whoa! You guys have got to see this!" interrupted any further discussion.

The inner sanctum was covered with a thick layer of white particulates. Had it not been a temperate climate, Daniel would have thought it was snow. Based on the way it rose in clouds around their feet, rising up and floating lazily back in slow, meditative cascades, Daniel thought for one wild fraction of a second that it could have been some sort of alien volcanic ash. Then, he breathed in and, in a sudden panicked epiphany, realized that the white something coating every surface of the inner sanctum and now coating them was in fact pollen.

Violent sneezing had him bent over at the waist, camcorder lost into the pollen pillow of the temple's floor. Each sneeze was more vicious than the last and he lost his footing, falling, completely swallowed in the thick white cloud. He felt a hand grab him by the scruff of his neck, dragging him to his feet and, still sneezing and gasping lung-fulls of white, hauling him back through the temple into the outside clearing with a firm grip on his vest.

He dragged his hands over his face, realizing with rising panic that they, too, were covered in the sticky white pollen. He wheezed, sneezed, and tried to blink the pollen out of his eyes which were running with tears and making it impossible to see.

"Breathe, Daniel. Calm down." Jack was on his right. He looked like he was moving at a different speed than the sound coming out of his mouth. Daniel's chest felt tight, his hands and feet tingly. Were the edges of his vision starting to gray out or was it just the pollen caked into his eyelashes?

"Daniel… Daniel, hey, look at me. I need you to swallow this, okay? It's Benadryl. It'll help." Daniel tried to move his hands to accept the tiny pink pills Jack was freeing from the first aid kit's blister pack, but his body wasn't responding. He tried to say something, to tell Jack what was going on, but his mouth wouldn't comply. His tongue felt thick and heavy in his mouth. The world was spinning far too fast. In another flash of insight, he realized both that this must be what anaphylaxis felt like and that he was about to vomit.

He leaned forward, losing the contents of his stomach as the darkening tunnel of his vision faded to white. He heard Jack swear and felt him push him onto his side in the recovery position, as he ripped open the velcro pocket on the front of his tac-vest. Daniel knew the pouch held an epipen, sending a word of thanks to the wisdom of Janet Fraiser and her insistence that just because none of them had need of an epipen on Earth didn't mean they wouldn't someday need one off world.

"Stay with me, Danny-boy. On three: one, two…" The sharp jab into his left thigh barely registered. He listened to Jack count slowly to ten and then felt the needle withdraw, replaced by Jack's hand holding pressure. Another hand encircled his wrist, taking his pulse. Heavy footfall echoed behind him, followed by a fast, lighter step.

"We need to get Daniel out of here now. Teal'c?" He felt himself lifted up by the armpits, suspended between Jack and Teal'c. Daniel considered how he had never yet been in his position while too unconscious to interact, but conscious enough to be able to know what was happening around him. It was a bizarre experience.

"I'll run ahead, dial the gate, and get a medical team, sir," Sam's voice was in front of them and then her fast footfall disappeared. Daniel felt himself dragged for what felt like miles, but which he knew was less than one, focusing instead on willing his body to continue breathing. He knew the epipen should have helped and may have in fact done so, but he couldn't quite shake the feeling of impending, chest crushing, throat-tightening doom. Stupid pollen.

The cold rush of gate travel was a welcome relief, as were the all too familiar sounds of the medical team meeting them on the ramp. He felt himself lowered onto the metal grating just as he lost all touch with reality.

The next thing he knew he was lying on a bed in the infirmary. Without opening his eyes, he could tell that there was an oxygen mask on his face and he was strangely cold. Was his hair wet?

"Daniel, are you coming back to us?" Janet's voice and, he assumed, her hands appeared at his right shoulder. He turned his head and tried to open his eyes. They felt heavy. In fact, his whole body felt heavy and tingly as if he'd managed to sit in a way that caused not just his foot to fall asleep, but every part of him.

"I can imagine you're feeling a little strange. You're very allergic to that pollen. It took a couple rounds of epi to bring you back to baseline."

It took all of his strength to open his eyes and he immediately regretted it. The room spun like a tilt-a-whirl. His head pounded and his stomach protested. He raised a shaky hand to move the oxygen mask. Janet's hand guided it back into place.

"You need to keep that on for now. You're not entirely out of the woods yet. Can you tell me your name?" Daniel closed his eyes again and breathed deeply, thankful that at least his chest was no longer tight.

"Daniel Jackson, July 8th… Janet, I'm going to…" The oxygen mask was off, his bed was raised, and a basin was in his lap before he finished his sentence. Focusing all his energy on both holding and aiming into the basin, he was only vaguely aware of Janet calling for a nurse and a warm sensation spreading from the IV in his left hand. He realized he must have stopped throwing up when the basin was no longer in his hands and he was instead lying down, a blanket tucked up to his shoulders.

"Try to rest, Daniel." With the last of his thoughts before falling asleep, Daniel mentally rolled his eyes and concluded that, it seemed, he didn't really have a choice in the matter.

Pulling back a wheelie chair next to General Hammond, Janet Fraiser took a seat at the table in the debriefing room. All conversation about P12X-597 stopped immediately.

"Any news?"

"How is he, doc?"

"How's Daniel?"

"What is the state of Daniel Jackson?"

All four individuals around the table spoke at once, demanding information before she had time for so much as a greeting. Janet smiled and rearranged the folder in front of her.

"Daniel will be fine. He's a bit uncomfortable at the moment, but no more than is normal after this type of allergic reaction. I've given him something to help with the nausea and I fully expect him to sleep for the next few hours. It goes without saying that, given that this is an alien form of pollen, we can't precisely predict how Daniel will react, but I would be surprised if he's not back to normal within the next few days." The relieved looks surrounding her at the table were always a welcome sight.

"Your fast thinking with the epipen made a world of difference in that, colonel." Jack looked a bit chuffed at her praise.

"Can't let you have all the fun with the needles, doc." Janet smiled.

"I suggest Daniel not come into contact with anything from P12X-597, nor should he venture there again as he is likely to have another severe reaction if he comes into contact with the substance in the future. I also would like to offer a refresher course on epipen administration and self-administration now that it is proven to be part of SG1's off world medical needs, at least for Daniel." All four heads around the table nodded.

"Consider it done, doctor." With a nod, Janet excused herself from the debriefing and returned to her patients in the infirmary.

48 hours later, Daniel sat slumped in his desk chair, blinking sleepily at incomprehensible symbols on his computer screen. He'd finally been discharged from the infirmary, but not before SG3 had come in hot and he'd been up all night listening to the loud, frustrated sounds of marines being triaged.

Jack considered knocking on Daniel's office doorframe. He'd been standing there almost thirty seconds without a response. The younger man looked pale and exhausted, but considerably less swollen and definitely not dead, so the zombie visage was a move in the positive direction.

"Hey." Daniel shifted his gaze toward Jack with a speed that made Jack thankful he was not yet cleared for active duty. A sloth would react faster.

"Hey." The raspy voice and subtly blood shot eyes made Jack feel a bit guilty for the sloth comparison and definitely thankful that Daniel was still confined to base.

"I thought about bringing flowers, but decided more pollen was probably not going to help. Carter managed to clean this off, though. She thinks that it shouldn't have anything from P12X-597 stuck to it anymore. These, too," Jack plopped Daniel's camcorder and a pair of his glasses atop a pile of papers. Daniel grinned.

"Thanks and, uh… thanks." Jack smiled and nodded.

"Oh, anytime. I'd never pass up the opportunity to stab you." Daniel rolled his eyes.

"Carter is heading back with SG11 later today. She said they'll get more footage of the temple and anything else they find." Turning the camcorder over, Daniel retrieved the memory card to begin the downloading process, not exactly sure if he wanted to learn more about P12X-597 and definitely sure that he didn't want to relive his own experience there.

"So, it turns out Teal'c has never seen Jumanji. He's got it all set up, making popcorn and everything. Are you game? It's bound to be more fun than whatever that is." Nodding his head and tossing the memory card aside, Daniel followed Jack out of his office. At least the vines on that screen wouldn't be covered in pollen that could kill him.

Not twenty minutes into the movie, Jack had to restrain himself from heading back to Daniel's office for his camera. Teal'c was completely engrossed in the film, thoroughly invested in the plot, and Daniel was fast asleep, head lolled back onto Teal'c's shoulder, mouth open, snoring faintly with the popcorn bowl forgotten between the two of them. Reaching across the slumbering archeologist for a handful of popcorn, Jack smirked. This sort of drama was definitely superior to the kind that involved needles.


	2. B is for Back

B is for Back

He hadn't even been pulling that hard when it happened. In fact, the crystals hadn't even been heavy at all. One moment, he'd been bent at the waist, shooting the breeze with Carter, and pretending not to know what he was doing with the crystals powering the alkesh. The next thing he knew, Jack was lying flat on the floor, feeling like the wind had been knocked out of him in unison with an indescribable pain pulsing from his back.

"Sir? Colonel, are you alright?" Sam's face was hovering above him, obvious worry furrowed above blue eyes. He thought about replying, but realized that the act of breathing through whatever muscle spasm was currently contorting his back, ribs, and everything else attached required one hundred percent of his mental capacity.

"Colonel, can you hear me?" The intense spasm decreased in ferocity and he managed a quiet "yes" which, if he was honest, sounded more like a muffled groan.

"What hurts?" He felt Sam's fingers on his wrist, verifying his pulse.

"Back." The spasm seemed to finish, ending in a gut wrenching tightening of every muscle from his neck to his glutes. Jack let out a hiss and tried to hold in a yell. Carter looked worried enough.

"How's it going back there? Teal'c's wanting to make the jump to hyperspace or we're going to be late for the rendezvous." Daniel's voice crackled in over their radios. Sam pulled a face and clicked the side of her radio.

"We're going to need to turn around. The colonel's been hurt. Daniel, I could use some help back here." Daniel was back with them before Sam finished her sentence, first aid kit in tow.

"Jack? Sam? What happened?" Jack blinked up at the two worried faces hovering above him and sighed.

"I…don't know." Daniel did his best impression of Teal'c's eyebrow acrobatics and turned to look at Sam.

"You don't know?" Sam shook her head and shrugged, dragging a hand through her head and looking down at him with worry.

"We were checking through the crystal bay to find whatever was preventing us from establishing a hyperspace window and… He was down. He said it's his back." Daniel echoed the same gesture, crossing his arms around himself.

"Was there a shock of some kind? Did you get shocked?" Sam shook her head. Jack closed his eyes and did a mental check of his person. No shock, he concluded, just acute and sudden pain.

"How did he end up on the floor? Did you lose consciousness? Jack, hey, stay with us here." He felt Daniel's hand come to rest on his shoulder and give a light shake. He opened his eyes in time to hear Sam's urgent "don't!" in tandem with a rough brush of Daniel's hand away from him, but it was too late. The damage was done. The shoulder shake reignited the back spasm and Jack heard himself yelp, felt his face contort in unison with every muscle in his torso, and struggled again to breathe deeply and evenly through the pain.

"Oh god, I'm sorry." Jack ignored him, focused entirely on breathing in and out, in and out, in and out.

Sam was back in his range of vision. She was saying words or at least her mouth was moving. His ears were ringing too loudly to make out what she was saying. Daniel seemed to be saying words, too. The ringing was too loud to hear anything. All he could focus on was breathing in and out around the pulsing pain of the muscles contracting rhythmically, randomly up and down and back and forth from his neck downwards. He closed his eyes and set his jaw.

"Jack… Jack, I'm not going to shake you, but I need you back with us. Can you hear me?" Daniel's voice was audible again. He was nothing if not persistent. Jack opened his eyes.

"Hey. We think you threw your back out or misaligned something. Is that what this feels like?" Jack tried to nod. Daniel's hands were instantly on either side of his head, holding it in place and preventing him from nodding.

"No, no, no, no, no, don't move. We think that's a bad idea. It might make things worse. We're going to immobilize your back and neck. Teal'c turned around. We'll be back at the alpha site soon. Try to hang in there." Jack rolled his eyes.

"With what? Not like there's a C collar and a backboard in the med kit," he growled. Daniel smiled down at him. Jack considered that this wasn't the most flattering angle for his friend and tried to blink and refocus his eyes in a way that made it so he wasn't looking up Daniel's nose. The man could use a tissue.

"We'll figure something out. Sam's on it." As if to prove Daniel's point, a loud clang resounded from somewhere off of his right.

"Got it!" Sam called.

"Are you sure? Isn't that a little, I don't know, big and heavy?" Daniel was looking off to Jack's right. Jack wished he could move his head and see what they were fussing about.

"Do you have a better idea?" Daniel looked thoughtful and shrugged. Sam appeared at the edge of his vision, holding what looked like a giant panel from the wall of the alkesh. Jack opened his mouth to make some pithy remark about being a literal fly on the wall, but a renewed back spasm had him otherwise occupied.

"Breathe, Jack. We're going to slide this under you. You're going to be fine." Jack ignored Daniel, focusing once more on breathing and trying not to call attention to the way the cold metal panel moved under him, lifting him slightly vertebrae by vertebrae and igniting the spasms with earnest. Jack kept his eyes closed and clenched his jaw, biting his tongue.

"Alright, sir, we're going to immobilize your head now." He felt soft bundles of fabric he realized must be changes of clothes rolled up on either side of his head and was instantly thankful that he had wrenched his back hours into the mission instead of days. At least the clothes pressed tightly up to his face were clean. Smelling his teammates B.O. would have made this whole thing so much of a better experience. Belts joined the clothes, encircling his head, waist, chest, and thighs, entirely immobilizing him.

"Alright, sir, we're done. How does that feel?" Jack opened his eyes to meet the concerned gaze of Daniel and Carter.

"Peachy." Daniel smiled.

"You know, Jack, if you didn't want to come to the Tok'ra summit, you could have just played hooky. You didn't have to be quite this dramatic." Jack felt the ship settle into a gentle landing and sent a silent thanks to Teal'c for his empathetic flying.

"Teal'c, Daniel, and I will carry you out, sir, and get you to the alpha site's infirmary. They're probably going to want to transport you back to the SGC. I don't think they have everything equipped here and you're better off with Janet, anyway." Jack would have nodded if he could have moved his head.

"Thanks."

"Anytime, sir."

"Yeah, Jack, and next time, leave the heavy lifting to Teal'c." Jack rolled his eyes.

"They weren't even heavy." He could just see Daniel's smirk out of the corner of his eye.

"Whatever you say, old man."

"Hey! If I could move right now, I'd hit you. Carter, I order you to whack Daniel." Daniel and Sam exchanged grins and muffled laughter.

"When you were out of it, Sam assumed temporary command. She doesn't have to hit me." Jack saw Teal'c enter from the left.

"Teal'c, whack Daniel for me." Teal'c looked between Jack and Daniel.

"He is needed to carry you from this vessel. Wounding him as well would not be wise." Jack muttered under his breath about mutiny and let his teammates carefully lift him and carry him from the alkesh. Of all the ways he had thought a mandatory summon to a Tokra summit could have gone, flat on his back tied to a wall with a pile of laundry had not even been a foreseeable option, but, as they emerged from the alkesh into the alpha site sunshine, Jack realized that his current position was not really far from any anticipated outcome – flanked and supported by his three closest friends.


	3. C is for Compound Fracture

C is for Compound Fracture

The last thing he remembered, he was chained at the ankle to the other members of his team, sprinting through the forest of a wooded planet, eluding the forces of Heru'ur. They'd been ambushed and captured a few days previous and managed to make a haphazard getaway, only to be discovered. In their frenzied rush toward the gate, they'd made it through the thickest part of the forest, burst through a thicket of brush, and, suddenly they'd been falling fast, the thicket obscuring their view of a steep incline. He remembered hearing the pain-filled grunts of his fellow teammates before finally coming to a stop in a heap at the bottom of the ravine as an explosion of agonizing pain erupted from his left thigh.

As far as he could tell based on the cold, wet feeling beneath him, the stale, damp taste in the air, and the lack of breeze, he was no longer lying in the ravine. Keeping his eyes closed and his breathing even so as not to alert anyone to his return to consciousness, Teal'c reached out with his senses, trying to determine his present location and the condition of his teammates.

"…That's a bone. That's 100% a bone. There is a bone sticking out of his leg. Right there."

"We know, Daniel."

"Well, what are we going to do about it? It's his femur. That's important."

"Well, he's not losing a lot of blood. That's a good sign. I don't think he's nicked an artery or anything."

"Excellent, Carter. Way to be positive, unlike Danny Downer over here."

"Hey! I'm just pointing out the obvious. It's not like he's easy to carry and right now we're holed up in a random, wet cave with god knows how many Jaffa on our tail, cutting us off from the gate. And he's seriously injured. He needs help."

"We know, Daniel."

"It's a bone!"

"You're acting like you've never seen a compound fracture before, Danny Boy. Cool it before you work yourself up and pass out again."

Teal'c cracked one eye. They were indeed sheltered in some sort of very wet cave. The lighting was poor, but he could make out the other members of his team sitting a short distance away. O'Neill was facing away from him, staring out into the falling curtain of rain at the mouth of the cave. Though he seemed tense, he appeared unhurt. Captain Carter, also visibly unhurt, was sorting through what remained of their supplies and tearing strips from a shirt. As a cold splash of condensation slipped from a stalactite above and hit him square on the sternum, Teal'c realized the shirt she was ripping must have been his. Daniel Jackson was slumped against the cave wall, looking much paler than he had earlier in the day with the exception of a dark bruise encircling his forehead and right eye. His eyes were particularly unfocused which explained the slight slur to his speech.

"I'm fine. He's not. We have to get him back to the SGC."

"Oh, for crying out loud! Will you quit moaning already? He's a Jaffa. He'll be fine. And we would be back in the infirmary already if you'd been looking where we were going. You're lucky you're concussed so I don't have to hit you."

Teal'c closed his eyes again and mentally took stock of his body. His own head felt unharmed, as did his neck, back, arms, hands, and torso. His right leg felt fine as well, but the excruciating pain pulsating from his left leg set his teeth on edge and clouded his thinking. Teal'c focused on controlling his breathing and listened to his teammates' continued bickering.

"He's got Junior."

"A symbiote can't set a bone."

"Well, for all we know, Daniel, it might be able to. We've never come across a Jaffa with a compound fracture."

"It's sticking out."

"You've established that, Daniel. We know."

"It's his immune system. Your immune system can't set your bones."

"It's more than just his immune system, Daniel. Try to rest. We'll figure this out."

A series of drips from the stalactites above dropped suddenly in rapid succession onto his chest. Teal'c tried to shift slightly away from the cold, wet onslaught and was instantly overcome with pain.

"Teal'c? Easy. Try to breathe." Captain Carter was kneeling next to him, her hands on his shoulders. Teal'c tried to do as she commanded, battling the gray at the edges of his vision and the urge to scream.

"How're you doing, T?" O'Neill was next to him now, too. Teal'c waited a minute before answering, making sure that his response would be something other than an anguished groan.

"I am in great pain. My leg is broken." Teal'c closed his eyes. The act of speaking took more force of will than he was willing to admit. He could not recall a time he had been in greater pain.

"We hear you, Teal'c. Hang in there." He felt O'Neill squeeze his shoulder in an attempt at reassurance. The attempt was much appreciated.

"Teal'c, you have a compound fracture. That means your bones are misaligned to the point that one end of one is sticking out. Will Junior repair that? I mean, will it put it back in place?" Teal'c had seen such a wound before on the field of battle, a fellow warrior with his arm bent to such a degree that the bones of his forearm jutted out like twigs. Bra'tac had bound the arm to stop the flow of blood and straightened the limb as much as he could, but, though the symbiote did it's best to repair the damage, the warrior had always had a curved forearm from that battle onward.

"It will not." Eyes still closed, Teal'c felt Daniel Jackson sit next to his head, the damp knees of his BDU pants brushing his ear more roughly than he knew the man intended.

"Easy, big guy. Don't kick him." Without opening his eyes, Teal'c knew the expression Daniel Jackson was sending O'Neill and the thought was enough to ease some of the pain.

"My symbiote will repair the broken bone, but it will not move the bones back into position. We must move them back ourselves." Teal'c opened his eyes to meet the concerned gaze of his teammates.

"Well… that's going to hurt." Up closer, Daniel's facial bruising looked even more impressive. His forehead looked slightly swollen like a faint reminder of the virus of the Touched and his right eye was a deep purple-red and nearly swollen shut. What little Teal'c could see of his right eye and his left were clearly quite unfocused and the bruising and abrasions stood out prominently against his pallor. Teal'c wondered if the injury was a result of the force of Daniel's own body during the fall or whether he had fallen upon Daniel's head.

"You think? Carter, any ideas?" Captain Carter looked around them at the damp cave walls and then back at the supplies she had spread out in a lone dry patch.

"Well, sir, I have one idea, but I'm not sure it will work and I'm pretty sure Teal'c's not going to like it." Teal'c took a deep breath and willed himself to relax. There were a lot of things about his current predicament that he did not like. Pain he could deal with, having a limb that was forever curved, however, was not an option he chose to pursue.

"And that idea is?" The drips from the stalactite that had been falling on his chest now fell on O'Neill.

"Traction, sir… I saw it done for a soldier in a field hospital once. I think I can rig something similar with the supplies we have." Captain Carter was fiddling with the inside of her lip.

"There's a but. I hear a but happening, Carter, what's the issue." O'Neill wiped the second series of drips away from where they slithered down the back of his neck.

"Traction, at least from my limited understanding, is usually a long, slow process with weights where the bones are carefully pulled back into alignment. It can take days, weeks, even months…" Carter mumbled before being cut off by O'Neill.

"…and Heru'ur's Jaffa will be here by nightfall. Is there a way to speed things up?" Captain Carter looked at Teal'c with a guilt-ladden, sympathetic expression.

"It's really going to hurt." Teal'c closed his eyes.

"So, just to be clear, our options at this point are to drag Teal'c back to the gate as is while avoiding the herd of Jaffa that are out there hunting us down or to cause him excruciating pain by resetting the leg and hoping that it heals in enough time to get ourselves out of here before Heru'ur finds our cave?"

"Yeah, Daniel, that sounds about right." Teal'c sighed and opened his eyes again, looking at O'Neill. There was no way he would allow himself to be a burden in such a way. If this did not work, he would rather be left behind than allow his teammates to be recaptured at his expense.

"Do it." With another reassuring squeeze of his shoulder, O'Neill nodded once to Teal'c and once to Captain Carter. Teal'c closed his eyes again and tried to kelno'reem.

When O'Neill awoke him a short time later with a gentle shake of the shoulder, Teal'c was immediately aware that his leg was bound in ropes. Captain Carter and Daniel Jackson sat at his feet, blank expressions hiding guilt at his anticipated pain.

"Alright, Teal'c, this is how it's going to go. I'm going to hold you by your armpits. Carter and Daniel are going to pull really hard on your leg until the bone slides back in where it needs to be. I need you to try and stay as still and quiet as you can. Moving will make it harder to put the bone back in and we don't know how close the search party is. Are you okay with that?" O'Neill's face was similarly stoic. The memory of his friend's screams as Bra'tac bound and straightened his arm flashed in Teal'c's mind. Unsure of his voice, he nodded.

"Okay. Ready? On three: one, two, three…" Teal'c felt his shoulders first, O'Neill's firm grip digging into his armpits and pulling his body towards him on the cold, wet cave floor. Then, the sensation of the ropes started. He felt them tightening around his knee and calf and then pulling, stretching taut rope, skin, and muscle around grinding bone. Teal'c could not breathe, let alone scream. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. The pain was worse than anything he could imagine. He heard the voices of his teammates talking to one another, urging each other on as the ropes and hands pulled tighter and tighter and tighter and then suddenly in a climax of indescribable pain, Teal'c felt a popping crack. Without opening his eyes, he knew that either it had worked or his leg had been ripped off.

"Teal'c? Teal'c, are you with us?" Captain Carter was up by his head, tapping him on the face. Teal'c wasn't sure he wanted to open his eyes, mind running wild with images of himself with only one leg. The sound of someone vomiting shook him from his fear-driven delusions and Teal'c opened his eyes a crack. O'Neill was supporting Daniel Jackson at the far edge of the cave, the younger man bent double and swaying.

"Daniel Jackson?" Teal'c asked. Captain Carter brushed a wetness from his forehead that Teal'c wasn't sure was sweat or cave drips and smiled.

"He'll be fine and so will you. The bone seems to have set. Do you think you can kelno'reem? How long will it take for your symbiote to heal the bone?" Teal'c watched O'Neill help Daniel back from the edge of the cave to where he had been sitting when Teal'c first came to, lowering him till he was curled up against the cave wall.

"I do not know." Carter nodded and drew a blanket he did not remember being covered in closer to Teal'c's chin.

"Take the time you need. I think we're safe here for now." He closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, and focused, entering the healing state of kelno'reem.

It was many hours later when he awoke. What little light had lit the cave earlier was gone, though the twinkle of unfamiliar constellations through the cave entrance signaled the end of the rain and clear skies. Through the wordless communication with his symbiote that kelno'reem provided, Teal'c was aware that, while the rest of his body had returned to its typical stamina, his left leg remained injured. The surrounding tissue around the broken bone had reformed, that much was done, but the break itself was incompletely healed. Frail figments of bone had begun to knit back together with the help of the painful setting, but any movement was likely to break the tentative union or result in misalignment and even more likely to be extremely painful. Reaching out once more with his senses, he tried to determine what had compelled him to awaken while still incompletely healed.

In the dim starlight, he could make out the shapes of his teammates. Daniel appeared asleep or unconscious a few feet away and both O'Neill and Captain Carter crouched by the mouth of the cave, heads together, whispering.

"We don't know how long this could take, sir. It could be minutes, hours, days… He's been out for close to four hours at this point. From what I can see, the skin itself is healed, but we have no way of knowing what's going on inside, whether it's set correctly, or whether it's healed… and then there's Daniel, sir."

"I know, Captain, but we've seen both of them in rougher shape before. We'll find a way home. Heru'ur's an ass, but they haven't found us yet. I figure we can hole up here at least until he wakes up which is hopefully soon. We'll have better luck dragging the two of them to the gate in the cover of darkness."

"I've managed to splint Teal'c's leg pretty well, but I'm not sure he should put any weight on it and I'm not sure Daniel's going to be able to get to the gate under his own power. He was pretty unsteady last time he was conscious."

"You know what they say, Carter, we'll burn that bridge when we cross it." Despite the uninspiring subject of their dialogue, Teal'c could see his teammates' grins glinting in the starlight. He closed his eyes, centered himself, and returned to kelno'reem, hoping that another hour of healing might strengthen his leg enough to put up a fighting chance.

The second time he awoke the reason for his alertness was more obvious. Captain Carter was crouched by his head, shaking his shoulder.

"Teal'c, we need you to wake up." Teal'c internally assessed his healing progress. The splint he could feel around his left leg seemed adequate to hold his femur in place and the bond between the broken bone fragments felt sturdier than the threadlike filaments he'd felt earlier. Testing his leg, he dragged himself into a seated position, flexed his ankle, and shifted his hip. It would hold.

"How are you doing?" In the still dim starlight, Teal'c could see that Captain Carter's face was covered in cave mud. Beyond her, O'Neill was crouching by Daniel Jackson, applying a similar cover to the sleeping man's visage.

"My leg will hold. What is the state of Daniel Jackson?" Carter turned to look over her shoulder at Jack and Daniel.

"He's not feeling too hot at the moment, but we think this is our best bet to make it to the gate. It's been dark for a few hours and we estimate a few hours until dawn. The colonel thinks cover at the gate should be lower. Do you agree?" Teal'c nodded.

"Indeed. Heru'ur will assume we have taken cover somewhere in the forest and are awaiting the dawn. There will be guards at the stargate, but fewer now than in the daylight." Captain Carter nodded.

"We figured as much. The colonel's going to help Daniel. I'm with you. What do you need?" Teal'c took stock of his body, judged himself to be capable of standing, and, pushing up with his good right leg, came to a standing position in the cave. Captain Carter gripped his bicep, steadying him. He slowly eased weight onto his left leg, thankful when it did not buckle or crumble beneath him. Wordlessly, Captain Carter shifted so that his left arm ringed her shoulders and together he shifted slowly forward, advancing the distance to O'Neill in an uncomfortable, but bearable shuffle.

"Nice. Go, T." O'Neill stood up from the mud-covered and groaning Daniel to clap Teal'c on the back.

"I scouted out the gate. We've got three of them watching for us at the moment and it's about a half a mile away." Teal'c nodded, steeling himself for the trek.

"I want you and Carter to take the lead. I'll cover our six with Daniel, here. Somehow I think you guys are going to be faster." Jack crouched back next to Daniel, helping him to sit up before hauling him into a similar weight-bearing position, the younger man slightly limp against him and mumbling incoherently.

"Go. We'll be right behind you." At the colonel's command, they took off. This time the rush toward the gate was far slower and their steps more plodding than frenzied, but the three-legged race type motion was humorously identical to the morning's escape.

As silent as they could, Teal'c and Sam progressed through the underbrush, the twinkling stars and crescent moon providing the dimmest of light. At last, the gate appeared ahead of them in a clearing, three shadowy figures silhouetted by its base and next to the DHD. Taking his arm back from Captain Carter, Teal'c leaned against a tree and plotted the best course of action. Despite grabbing their packs, they had been unable to gather any weaponry when they broke free from capture that morning and, while he knew they were both skilled in hand to hand, he doubted his prowess in his current state.

As he pondered the optimum approach, the colonel and Daniel Jackson appeared behind him. Jack lowered the younger man against a neighboring tree and he curled up in a ball, hands wrapped around his head, breathing shallowly. He looked in considerable pain, but more conscious than before.

"Alright, here's what I'm thinking. Carter and I are going to grab that one by the DHD and take his staff, which we'll use to get Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Teal'c, I need you to stay with Daniel here in case there's anyone we can't see waiting to surprise us from behind. Capiche?" Shifting his weight and hobbling over to stand above Daniel Jackson, Teal'c nodded. Captain Carter and O'Neill nodded back and disappeared silently into the undergrowth. Listening to the pained breaths of his injured teammate and the surrounding night noise of the forest, Teal'c watched as the Jaffa by the DHD was silently incapacitated, four arms reaching out of the darkness of the bushes and drawing him in without a sound before the fire of a staff weapon took deadly aim and downed both guards. Teal'c was impressed. The two remaining members of his team were at his side again before he could blink, victorious grins on their faces.

"Alright. Let's move out. Got you a present, Teal'c." The colonel was holding out a big stick and the staff weapon and looking more pleased with himself than the small canine Cassie kept upon similar offerings. Bowing his head in thanks, he took the offered makeshift crutches and hobbled forward, making space for the colonel and the captain to pull Daniel to his feet. Teal'c crutched along to the DHD, entering the symbols and the IDC code before moving as quickly as possible behind the rest of SG1.

The bright lights of the SGC were a harsh contrast with the darkness of the forest, but, as his eyes adjusted and the medical team descended upon the four of them, Teal'c was glad for the safety, warmth, and support they represented. From the depth of a cave to the bowels of a mountain, Teal'c was glad to be home.


	4. D is for Drowning

D is for Drowning

The worst thing about the whole situation as far as she was currently concerned was how incredibly cold the water was, though the waves pounding over her head and forcing her under every few seconds were no picnic. The freezing temperature of the lake surrounding her drove the air immediately from her lungs upon impact and, though she fought to keep her head above water, the numbing cold made it hard to move her limbs and harder to tell whether she was moving them and where they were. The strength of the waves was growing harder to fight and, though she kicked and flailed with all she had, she soon found herself submerged, icy water numbing her from the inside out as she swallowed and inhaled a lungful of dark, freezing water. As she sunk deeper, the frozen, icy darkness seemed to solidify and, in a panicked breath of black frozen lake, she realized with terrifying insight that this might be it. Sam was drowning.

They'd been crossing the bridge from the gate when it had given out, the age of the bridge and its poor construction choosing that inopportune moment to combine for a complete, catastrophic failure. Carter had been taking point and was unfortunately in the exact middle of the shoddily built structure when it had self-destructed, dropping her swiftly and silently into the swirling, icy water below. Jack hated winter planets.

Thankful that Teal'c and Daniel were behind him and able to leap back onto the sturdier stone steps leading to the DHD and stargate, Jack quickly unclipped his pack from his back and P90 from his front, tossing them their way and jumping in after Sam.

"Carter!" She wasn't immediately visible in the swirling, icy water. Jack swore loudly and splashed about, exhilarating moments of contact with underwater objects crashing his hopes like the waves tossing him about when the objects revealed themselves to be pieces of the bridge and not his 21C. It felt like an eternity, but in reality was just a few breathless seconds before that which he felt underwater was suddenly not a hard piece of wood or twine, but, in fact, a softer, fabric covered form. He gripped onto her arm, pulling her up so that her head once again broke the surface.

"Hey, hey, hey, Carter, come on." She was totally limp, freezing cold, and, as far as he could tell, out cold. He didn't want to consider any alternatives. Shaking her and earning no response, he changed plans and kicked out with his legs and the arm not holding Carter, charting a course as swiftly as possible back through the freezing, frothy lake to the steps.

An annoying thwack of rope hit him square on the face and it took a moment before he realized that the rope was an offering of aid from the remaining half of his team. Gripping the rope tightly with one hand and Carter with the other, Jack kicked and sputtered, thankful when four hands encircled his outstretched arm and lugged the two of them up onto the cold stone step.

"She's not breathing! I can't find a pulse!" Daniel's high pitched, panicked statement sent a chill to his core somehow colder than he already felt and his stomach sank.

Slipping and sliding around Teal'c, Jack watched as Daniel quickly unzipped Sam's vest and started chest compressions, alternating thirty beats to two breaths, thirty beats to two breaths. Frozen on the spot, he heard Teal'c dial the gate and radio through the situation, summoning a medical team, before returning to them and coordinating movement. They had come up with the plan to pause compressions long enough to sprint and drag her through the gate to the SGC if the team did not come through when she let out a strangled coughing sound. Daniel and Teal'c turned her on her side and Jack watched, teeth chattering and heart pounding, as she coughed out a disturbing amount of black looking water before gasping in life-giving oxygen.

"Yes! Yes, Sam, good, good job, that's it." The rush of adrenaline and terror of the moment seemed to have robbed the linguist of his usual vocabulary. Jack knelt next to Daniel, freezing, shaking hands joining his as they felt for a pulse that was reassuringly strong.

"Can you hear us, Samantha Carter?" Teal'c's use of her first name and the gravely depths of his voice belayed that, though his hands were not shaking like the other men on his team, he was equally shaken. She didn't respond verbally, but the slight nod of her head was more joyous communication than Jack could have described in words.

"Sorry about your ribs, Sam. You stopped breathing on us for a bit." Daniel had removed his coat to cover Sam and had moved around into her line of sight, shaking hands holding hers. Jack placed a hand reassuringly on her shoulder.

The medical team, led by a determined looking Janet Fraiser, burst through the event horizon and quickly joined them on the bottom step. Jack and Daniel moved back to let them work.

"Glad to see you're with us again, Sam. How long was she out, Daniel?" Jack felt some sort of tinfoil warming blanket dropped around his shoulders by a nameless medic while he listened to Janet and Daniel talk, amazed by how quickly everything seemed to have gone and thankful that Daniel had apparently looked at his watch often enough to have the information Janet was requesting. Had they really only been in the water for seven minutes at the most? Had it only been five minutes since they started compressions and two since she came around?

"And how are you doing, colonel?" Jack blinked and realized that Carter had been wrapped in blankets, loaded onto a stretcher, and was being carried back up the steps and through the gate by the medics and Teal'c.

"Jack? He jumped in right after her and hasn't said a word since we got them out of the water." Janet and Daniel were crouching in front of him. Janet placed one hand on his forehead and the other around his wrist.

"You're feeling a bit hypothermic and shocky to me, colonel. Are you with us?" Jack nodded, touched to realize that Janet, unlike the rest of the medical team who came through the gate, was still wearing her white coat and SGC uniform, the urgent need to respond overriding the protocol dictating changing into an off-world uniform.

"Are you okay, Jack?" Jack tried to respond, but the connection between his brain and his mouth seemed frozen over. He nodded again instead. Daniel frowned at Janet.

"Do you think you can walk, colonel?" Slowly, Jack felt his body respond to his thoughts. He reached one arm out to grasp Daniel's hand and pulled himself up stiffly.

"Take your time, Jack, we've got you." The reassuring warmth of Daniel and the doc flanked him on either side. It took a disturbing amount of focus to move his legs and climb the steps to the gate.

He was so caught up in the act of putting one foot in front of the other that he didn't register where they were or where they were going until he felt the two of them step back and he found himself sitting on a bed in the infirmary. In another blink, he realized that a hospital gown had somehow replaced his BDUs, an IV was pushing warm fluids into his arm, and he was wrapped in warming blankets. Daniel and Teal'c were sitting next to him, a chess set between them, and he could just make out Carter on the bed on the other side of them. She was similarly decked in blankets and an IV and, though she looked as pale as the white sheets beneath her and had an oxygen mask on her face, she was clearly breathing.

"Jack? Hey! Oops." To Teal'c's obvious annoyance, Daniel leapt to his feet and upset the chessboard. Teal'c moved to pick up the pieces as Daniel shifted his focus to Jack.

"Let me guess. You were losing?" Daniel rolled his eyes and crossed his arms in a way that meant that Jack was exactly correct. He smirked.

"Carter?" Daniel picked up a few pawns that had rolled under Jack's bed.

"Janet thinks she might have pneumonia from inhaling so much nasty water, but she'll probably be fine. She was awake and talking for a bit. No lasting damage." Teal'c rearranged the chessboard in a way that clearly conveyed that if Daniel upset the chessboard again, he would show him the meaning of lasting damage.

"It is good to have you back with us as well, O'Neill." Jack smiled and sunk deeper into the warmth of the infirmary bed.

"Winner plays Jack." Sending one last look over to where Carter was safely snuggled down in her bed, Jack closed his eyes and gave back in to sleep. For such a failure of a mission, the ending felt like quite a win after all.


	5. E is for Exhaustion

E is for Exhaustion

Jack leaned against the pointy wall of the Tok'ra chamber and sent an envious look over to Daniel and Teal'c. Daniel, perhaps through years of digs, had mastered the art of falling asleep wherever and whenever possible. Despite the rather unforgiving surface of the blue crystal material, the man was dead to the world, head lolling back against the wall in a way that was sure to give him a headache in the morning, mouth agape with a hint of drool budding at the edge, arms and legs spread out like a rag doll, snoring softly. Teal'c looked far more dignified, sitting cross-legged beside him deep in kelno'reem. Jack made a mental note to pay closer attention the next time Teal'c offered to teach him the practice and sighed. Despite having plenty of years of sleeping in unusual places and conditions under his own belt, sleep was not coming to pay him a visit, it seemed.

They'd gated to a neutral location before being brought to the Tok'ra's secret coordinates for a meeting of vague necessity a few days ago. Jack hadn't slept since. Carter had gone off to share quarters with her father and share information and research ideas with Anise. He'd been left with Daniel and Teal'c to meet with various members of the Tok'ra counsel about ongoing situations with different Goa'ulds, the state of galaxy politics, and whether or not more hosts could be offered by the Tauri. The meetings were both, as in the cases of the first two topics, mind-numbingly boring or frustrating and, as in the later topic, utterly disturbing and not something Jack ever wanted to think about.

He stood up and wandered the perimeter of the chamber. It would have been nice of the Tok'ra to give them some sort of beds, but it seemed that soft surfaces or comfort of any kind had been forgotten when this particular chamber had been grown. The less pointy, potentially more comfortable sitting/lying area of the chamber was fully occupied by Daniel and Teal'c. The rest of the room, save for the flat, hard floor, was not the kind of surface he'd want to do anything more than briefly lean against in some parts and not even hazard to brush against lest he rip a hole in the sleeve of his coat.

He'd passed the point of exhaustion when things made sense a few days ago and was now squarely in the place where everything hurt, nothing was worth thinking about, and he really, desperately wanted to go home. He'd been this tired before on deployments and ops, but usually only when the shit was hitting the fan, everything was on the line, and if you slept, people died. It was worthless to be this tired when their entire mission was nothing but a series of never-ending meetings. It took a moment for him to realize that the shaking sensation of his legs was not, in fact, from fatigue, but rather from what seemed perhaps like an earthquake.

"O'Neill, we are under attack." Teal'c was now standing next to him and Daniel was climbing to his feet, blinking blearily and rubbing a hand over the ache in his neck.

"What do we do?" Jack blinked at Daniel in answer to his question. He was too tired for this. Why couldn't they have attacked a few days ago when he'd had a little sleep?

"O'Neill, should we attempt to locate Major Carter and lend aid to the Tok'ra?" Jack nodded, thankful for Teal'c's prompting and fumbled with his radio.

"Carter? Come in, Carter." The radio made a bizarre squawking noise. He cleared his throat and tried again.

"Carter?" The squawk continued. Daniel took out his own radio.

"Sam, come in." Jack looked down and realized that he'd been pressing the wrong button. Damn, he needed to sleep.

"We're okay, Daniel, heading to your position now." Daniel was sizing him up and wincing. Jack crossed his arms and glared back.

"You look horrible. Did you get any sleep?" Jack had caught a reflection of himself in a mirror earlier and knew Daniel wasn't exaggerating. The circles under his eyes were the size of dinner plates. He looked pale and only marginally better than he felt.

Jacob and Carter barreling into the room cut off any snide comeback he could think up. Before they had crossed the rest of the way through the room, Jacob was giving him a look that rivaled Daniel's and Carter looked slightly alarmed and sympathetic.

"Jesus, Jack, what happened to you?" Jack shrugged. It wasn't that he didn't want to launch into a tirade about Tok'ra hospitality, he was just too tired to do it justice.

"I'll be fine." Daniel and Teal'c were both raising identical eyebrows in his direction. Jack rolled his eyes and made a note to encourage some time apart in their bromance.

"A ha'tak is in orbit around the planet and is firing on our location. We need to evacuate. I'd ask you to stay around and lend a hand, but now I'm guessing sending you out of the range of fire is a better choice." Jack rolled his eyes at Jacob, annoyed at the insinuation that they couldn't be helpful, but grateful for the chance to get out of there.

"I'll touch base when we've made it wherever we're going and we can find a time to finish up the work we started." Another volley caused an even greater shake and Jack found himself suddenly being held up by Teal'c. Jacob looked increasingly worried and turned to leave.

"Be careful on the way to the gate," he called over his shoulder, disappearing down the quaking corridor.

Sam and Daniel were both sizing him up now and Jack realized that Teal'c had yet to let go of his shoulders. Jack shrugged out of the support, grabbed his pack, and turned back to his team, following Jacob's footsteps.

"Come on, kids. You heard the man. Let's get out of here." He made his way slowly down the corridor, dodging Tok'ra bearing all manner of belongings, and made his way to the mouth of the base, turning back to see Carter, Daniel, and Teal'c hot on his heels. The hot, dry sand stretched out before him, promising a long, uncomfortable trek to the gate.

"You going to make this?" Daniel was standing next to him, speaking softly in a way that was clearly meant to make him believe that whatever answer he gave would stay between the two of them despite the two pairs of ears eagerly listening from behind them.

"I'm fine." Daniel gave him a look that conveyed exactly how much of that statement he believed. Jack rolled his eyes for the umpteenth time and set out into the dunes. Why was it always a desert planet?

It seemed the attack was focused solely on the Tok'ra base. Despite their exposed movement through the dunes, SG1 received no fire from the ha'tak, unnoticed either through the camouflage of their BDUs or the unbroken focus of the Jaffa in the ha'tak. Jack soldiered on in the lead, determined not to show how dizzy and weak the lack of sleep was making him or how the wind moving over the sand was dredging up forgotten images of other times he'd wandered tired and hurt through desert places like wakeful nightmares. Moving swiftly through the sand, they reached the gate.

Jack headed for the DHD as Daniel, Teal'c, and Carter knelt to provide cover. He dropped one hand from his P90 and hovered it over the symbols, his mind going terrifyingly blank. Being overtired to the point of dizziness and daydreams was one thing, but forgetting the address for earth was a whole different ballgame. He held his breath. What symbol was first?

Crouching in the sand, Carter watched her CO. To say he looked horrible was the understatement of the century. Back in the Tok'ra chamber, he looked ready to fall over. She'd watched as he'd jumped every time the wind gusted the dunes or a sound from the attack behind them echoed over the desert as they walked toward the gate. Now, swaying before the DHD, he looked like dialing home was something way outside the scope of his current abilities.

Glancing side to side and confirming that they were indeed alone and not in need of three individuals providing cover, Sam stood and turned to the DHD, silently putting in the address for earth and her IDC code on her GDO. She turned to see the billow of the event horizon and then back towards the colonel who was blinking confusedly, eyes half-mast. She put a hand on his elbow and steered him toward the gate, worry growing when he didn't fight it.

"Let's go!" she shouted over her shoulder, stepping through the blue of the open gate with one hand still firmly attached to her CO's elbow.

The reception on the other side was only slightly different than normal. Hammond, realizing immediately upon their exit from the wormhole that Jack looked incredibly off, summoned a medical team who whisked the quietly protesting colonel away. They'd sat around through a debriefing, filling Hammond in both on the meetings Daniel, Teal'c, and the colonel had attended as well as what new technology Anise had managed to score and had either shared with Sam or left where she had access to it while Anise was otherwise occupied.

It was about an hour later when she found herself in the infirmary. Daniel and Teal'c had headed for the showers, eager to wash away the sand that clung to parts of them that they weren't willing to discuss. After the usual post-mission physical exam and a quick rinse in the infirmary shower, she found herself standing at the foot of the colonel's bed.

In the bright infirmary lights, he looked older. The fluorescent glow brought out the wrinkles in his forehead and around his eyes, but even with the added emphasis, he looked better than he had on the planet and, most importantly, he was asleep, mouth agape, snoring faintly. Smiling, she pulled the chair over to the side of his bed, wincing at the noise and then grinning when she realized it had had no effect. Overcome by her own fatigue, she curled up in the chair, folding her head onto her arms and resting them against the mattress by the colonel's feet, smiling when she felt his feet shift in his sleep and his leg lean heavily against her arm. They didn't always get a lot of sleep on missions. Some missions, they got no sleep at all, but, even when someone ended up in the infirmary, they could always count on each other to help them get some rest.


	6. F is for Food Poisoning

F is for Food Poisoning

Jack squinted up at the third moon as it inched closer to the tree-laden horizon and rolled his shoulders. This watch was dragging on and he was getting the sinking suspicion that the miserable feeling watch was inspiring had less to do with the disruption in his sleep cycle or the absolute boringness of the planet and more to do with a growing queasiness and the painful stomach cramps that were suddenly attacking him out of the blue. Getting sick was something he hated doing as a rule and getting sick while on a mission was unthinkable. Hoping that a few more hours of sleep would put whatever was brewing to rest, Jack gave one last look around the clearing for any activity from the locals and turned into the tent he was sharing with Daniel, intending to rouse the younger man and switch positions.

In the beam of moonlight from the tent's opening, Jack could see that Daniel wasn't looking too hot either or, rather, that was exactly how he looked. Sweat beaded up on his forehead and rolled in rivulets back into his hair away from a face that looked far paler in the light of the moons than it had before Jack left for watch. Still asleep, his face was contorted into an expression of definite discomfort, arms wrapped around his midsection with knees up in a fetal position. Jack put a hand on Daniel's forehead. He didn't feel too hot, but he didn't feel cool either.

"Daniel?" Jack shook his shoulder and called his name quietly earning a low groan from his still sleeping teammate.

"Daniel? Hey, wake up." Jack felt mildly guilty in waking him, but he wasn't feeling all that well himself and it was impossible to know whether or not this was going to be a mission they'd have to scrub and turn back early or not without at least talking to him and figuring out how badly off both of them were. He shook Daniel's shoulder a bit more forcefully, getting a louder groan that morphed into a syllable Jack now recognized as an Abydonian swear word.

"Yeah. I know. Let's talk plan here. What's going on?" Daniel opened his eyes and moved to sit up, running one hand through his hair and gripping his midsection with the other, groaning again. A cramp kicking him in his own gut, Jack returned a commiserating grunt and sat down heavily on his own sleeping bag.

"Talk to me, Daniel." Daniel sighed and swallowed experimentally.

"I'm not feeling so good." He swallowed again and shifted so his knees were to his chest, letting out a noise half between a sigh and a whimper.

"Yeah, tell me about it. Stomach cramps, nausea, the works – what've you got going on?" Daniel nodded grimly, running his hands back through his hair and trying to swallow again before staggering to his feet.

"I'm going to…" He didn't finish the sentence, but the concluding infinitive was implied in his hurried, barefoot rush out of the tent and the sound of retching that followed. Wincing as his own gut threatened to join in on the action, Jack followed him back out into the clearing, grabbing his canteen.

"Here." Daniel, who was gripping an unfortunately decorated tree, shook his head and returned to heaving. Jack averted his gaze to the three moons, urging his own stomach to behave itself. The sensory stimulation of the sound and smell of Daniel's puking proved to be too much, however, and another stomach cramp had him lurching forward and evacuating his stomach so fast he almost cracked his nose against the tree's trunk.

Somehow, the surround sound of vomiting made it less miserable. It was a few moments before his stomach quieted and he was able to realize that the stereo retching came not just from Daniel on his right, who was leaning into his arm, spitting the taste of bile against the poor tree's trunk, and from himself, but also from Carter who was to his left, bent double against a neighboring tree, waging war with the contents of her own stomach. He swallowed, waited a beat to make sure he was done with this particular exercise, swished a swig of water through his mouth, and handed the canteen to Daniel before shuffling over to his 21C.

"Decided to join the party, eh, Carter?" She flashed him a sad smile that quickly became a grimace, returning to battle position. Jack grimaced in sympathy and wrapped an arm around his own aching gut.

He heard footfall behind him and turned to see Teal'c approaching, staff weapon and first aid kit in his hands. Daniel came up beside him and Carter, offering a sympathetic arm pat and a look of twin misery.

"Have you all taken ill?" Teal'c questioned, raised eyebrow glinting in the moonlight. Daniel and Jack nodded in morose unison.

"Well, you know what they say – the team that pukes together…" a particularly nasty stomach cramp had Jack suddenly vying for real estate on Carter's tree instead of Daniel's.

"I take it we're heading back, sir." Spitting the remaining bile from his mouth, Jack straightened and nodded, not quite letting go of the tree.

"Teal'c, get to the gate and radio Hammond. Let him know we're headed back and are a bit worse for wear. Carter, Daniel…" the remainder of the order was issued by his rebelling stomach.

"We'll start packing the tents and get ready to move out, sir."

"I shall inform General Hammond and return to offer assistance momentarily."

Not trusting his ability to speak and vomit at the same time, Jack flashed a thumbs-up and continued to embrace the tree. By the time his stomach had settled itself enough for him to straighten and he could turn back towards the clearing, the tents and all that was within them were neatly folded, rolled, and packed away. Sam and Daniel were sitting on a fallen log, pale and somber. Jack sent silent thanks on the same mental wavelength that had somehow communicated the remainder of his orders to his teammates and shuffled to their position across the clearing, grabbing his pack.

"Ready?" The pale, somber faces nodded, staggering to their feet beside him.

"We'll meet Teal'c en route. Let's get home to Fraiser." He led the miserable crew out of the clearing, past the puking trees, and onto the path to the gate. The journey was long and slow, progress broken by frequent stops to decorate other trees and bushes along the way as the painful stomach cramps, vomiting, and nausea made their effects known through both ends of their digestive tracts. By the time they crossed the event horizon and soldiered down the gate ramp, Jack, Daniel, and Sam felt completely drained and weak, wrung out like so many used sponges.

"Welcome back, SG-1. Can you make it to the infirmary?" Unsure of his ability to open his mouth for any other purpose than puking, Jack sufficed for a silent nod, left further explanations to Teal'c, and dragged himself towards the elevator. He was impressed that they made it all the way to the infirmary without a pit stop, though the fact that he and Daniel knocked heads over the infirmary wastebasket upon entering and Carter made a fast beeline for the infirmary bathroom announced both their presence and their need for medical care.

"I shouldn't be surprised to see that Teal'c wasn't exaggerating. Let's get some IVs started and push some fluids and Zofran." He felt a grip on his bicep redirecting him away from the wastebasket and into a bed, found an emesis basin placed under his nose, and felt someone remove the shoes from his feet, slap a blood pressure cuff on his arm, and wrap the little red ET thing he didn't care to remember the real name of on his index finger. He was so busy becoming friends with his basin that the whole process of the placing of the tourniquet, the cleaning of his arm, and the pinch of the IV didn't even register until it was over and he had a brand new tube appendage.

He spared a glance at Daniel and Sam on the neighboring beds. Daniel was hugging his own basin like a life raft and Sam looked about as good as he felt, the arm without her IV flung over her face as if somehow blocking out reality. Motion at the infirmary door drew his attention and he summoned what little energy reserve he had left to look at least somewhat presentable.

"Teal'c has filled me in on what happened for the most part, but I'd like to hear from you if you're able, colonel." Hammond cursed the chain of command in his head. As long as the leader of a team was conscious, he was compelled to pester them for information following a scrubbed mission, but Jack looked awful, as did the rest of his team with the exception of the lucky, symbiote-carrying Jaffa. His heart went out to them.

"We, uh…" was as far as Jack got before he clamped his mouth shut and grew somehow paler, some ridiculous personal standard about appearing ill in front of his commander obviously vying with his body's urge to continue to vomit.

"I think this is food poisoning, sir. We ate with the local people…. We ate MREs, but they shared some sort of milky beverage, sir." Carter, picking up on the colonel's predicament, raised herself on one elbow and corroborated Teal'c's tale.

"It's, uh… it's my fault, General. I thought we'd, uh… I thought we'd offend them if we didn't take… take something. It, uh, seemed harmless." Daniel let out a hollow laugh that turned into heaves. With Daniel's heaving on his left, Jack lost his battle. Hammond turned his back to spare their dignity and searched instead for the doctor.

"I don't want to say anything conclusive this early on before any of the tests come back, but all signs point to food poisoning, sir. Depending on the cause, we should start to see improvement within the first 24 hours." The loud ringing of claxons cut off any reply of his and so, with a quick thanks and a sympathetic nod towards the three occupied beds, Hammond left the infirmary.

As the rolling of his stomach once again quieted, Jack was overcome with a competing, equally powerful urge to sleep. He closed his eyes and curled around his basin, unsure whether or not one urge would cancel out the other. It wasn't until he felt someone shaking his shoulder a few hours later that he realized he'd actually slept.

"O'Neill" Teal'c's voice penetrated the thick cloud of sleep still clinging to him. He opened his eyes back to the harsh florescent lighting and blinked sleepily at the Jaffa standing over him, feeling close to road kill.

"O'Neill, have you awakened?" Jack dragged a hand over his face. The tug of an IV reminded him of the way he'd spent most of the past few hours and he swallowed, experimenting with the idea of things moving down his digestive tract instead of up.

"I'm up, T. What's going on?" he rasped, hearing groans signaling a similar limbo-level of wakefulness on the neighboring beds. The fact that Teal'c held his staff weapon and had four zats cradled in the crook of his arm banished what cobwebs remained in his consciousness and Jack sat up straighter in bed.

"What's with the arm armory?" He heard Carter and Daniel shift and come around fully as well.

"There has been an incursion. Your assistance is needed, if you are able." Jack heard Daniel mutter a few swear words in a colorful array of languages and held out his hand for a zat.

"Go on," he prompted, reaching over to unhook the line from his IV port. Daniel and Sam followed suit.

"SG-4 returned and were accompanied by a squadron of Jaffa. I have scouted their position. There are ten of them left. Eight were felled by the SFs in the gate room. The ten have taken the gate room and are holding everyone on base there. We must regain control before they exit the base or kill any of their hostages." Teal'c handed Carter and Daniel each a zat.

"Sounds like a plan." He swung his feet to the floor and stood slowly, trying to hide the wave of nausea and lightheadedness that threatened to send him back in bed with his basin. Carter looked similarly unsteady. Daniel didn't try to hide anything, sitting quickly back, all color draining from his face. Teal'c surveyed the three of them and raised an eyebrow as if torn between asking if they were well enough to assist him and knowledge that, even though they weren't, he didn't have any other option.

"You good?" Jack hooked his zat on his belt, thankful that he hadn't been stripped of his fatigues and put in a gown as he slept, and held a hand out to Daniel. Sighing shakily, Daniel gripped his hand and stood, nodding.

"Carter?" Coming to stand next to Teal'c with a look of exhausted resignation, his 21C also nodded affirmatively. Jack nodded at Teal'c who silently led them out of the infirmary, down the hall, and all the way to the gate room.

It wasn't until he was crouching with his team, flanking the open door that he realized the enormity of the situation and what a horrible idea this all was. From what he could see at a glance through the door, Teal'c's numbers were right and there was a hell of a firefight ahead of them. From what he could see of his team, there was no way in hell they were in a shape to put up with it. Teal'c was Teal'c, of course, and the adrenaline rush seemed to be bringing some semblance of color back into Carter's cheeks, but Daniel looked worse, pallor tinged with green, sweating profusely and breathing shallowly as he collapsed more than crouched against the wall. As the sound of rumbling Jaffa grew closer, Jack realized both that this was the moment they either had to act or be captured like the rest of the base and that Daniel was going to throw up. Lurching forward into clear view of everyone in the gate room, Daniel nearly face planted, stomach winning the battle of survival versus evacuation as he decorated his boots and the floor.

With a stern nod and the hope that the three remaining members of his team were still tuned into the same mental wavelength, he took advantage of the ensuing chaos, standing to block Daniel and firing his zat with abandon. The gate room was suddenly awash in the dance of zat lightening, but it died down as quickly as it struck. As his eyes adjusted, Jack was glad to see that the Jaffa were all down and his team was unhurt. He stood for a moment, blinking, all energy suddenly gone and his ears ringing. Daniel stepped around him, wiping a shaky hand across his mouth, and pulled a bunch of zip ties from his pocket. Breathing in a way that made it clear he was still about to throw up, he slipped the measly restraints around the unconscious Jaffa as Carter and Teal'c moved amongst the SGC staff, freeing them from their bonds.

"Jack." The fact that Daniel was crouching next to him made him realize that at some point he must have sat down.

"We have a problem." Daniel swallowed, closed his eyes, and clenched his jaw, clearly eager not to repeat his pre-firefight performance. Jack looked around and concluded that he must have either passed out or taken a bit of a snooze. Teal'c and Carter were gone, as were the Jaffa. The rest of the staff was mumbling amongst themselves as if returning to their own level of consciousness, clustered by the gate.

"What's going on?" Daniel waited a beat before attempting to reply.

"They, uh… You, uh… There were ten. You guys got nine. One of them is somewhere. Hammond's also missing… uh… Word is number ten took him in the direction of his office." Daniel was growing greener again.

"Okay. Are you up for taking one more on?" Swallowing forcefully and raising an eyebrow, Daniel shot him a glare.

"You're the one who passed out and took a nap over here for the past few minutes." Jack glared back.

"Look who's talking, big guy. You're the one who puked all over the doorway and gave away our position. Help me up before you vomit all over me." Daniel stood and held out a hand. Jack grabbed it.

"Only if you don't puke on me. I've done enough of that myself, thanks." Smiling half deliriously, they gripped dizzily to one another and followed the reported trail of Hammond and the last remaining Jaffa.

The harsh, raised voices signaled that they were indeed in Hammond's office. From the view he had once again crouched beside the door jam, Hammond had his arms bound behind his back, a nasty looking gash on his bald head, and was spitting fiery words at the hulk of a Jaffa setting up some sort of Goa'uld bomb. Jack attempted to communicate with Daniel in hand signals, but the younger man had his eyes closed, green tinged pallor and shallow breathing once again foreshadowing a giveaway of their position.

"Daniel," Jack whispered menacingly, hoping the noise inside the office would mask the sound. Daniel opened his eyes, his expression morphing into a grimace of an apology. Jack glared at him and shook his head, conveying the plan in hand signals and the need to keep a lid on it just a little longer through his facial expression. Daniel ground his jaw tight, moving as if gagging slightly, and nodded. On the count of three, they stood and swung into the room, firing. Jack watched his zat hit the Jaffa and saw him topple to the ground as Daniel, his shot going wide and skittering into the bookshelf, threw up onto Hammond's desk, covering, effectively shorting out, and defusing the bomb.

Hammond bit his tongue and shook his head. For as often as they were a lucky success, SG-1 had their share of bad luck. This whole episode of food poisoning was a testament to that. Yet, as much as they fell hard when they were down, his front team had the unique ability to turn a sour situation to their benefit.

He surveyed his two saviors. Daniel looked equally like he would be blushing with embarrassment if he could and like he was a moment away from a repeat performance, settling heavily in the chair next to his desk, wrapping his arms around himself, and sending a longing look at Hammond's wastebasket. Jack had fallen unceremoniously into the seat across from him, gazed unfocused and face beyond pale in a way that worried Hammond that he was about to pass out if not that he was most of the way unconscious already. Hands still bound, Hammond stepped over the unconscious Jaffa and nudged the wastebasket closer to Daniel with his foot just in time to see Teal'c and a med team appear in his doorway.

"General Hammond, are you well?" Hammond smiled and turned to let Teal'c loosen the binding on his hands.

"I'm a hell of a lot better than these two. Let's get them back to the infirmary, son." Jack and Daniel bore the usual mortification of a stretcher ride back to the fluorescent lights and sharp needles of Janet's domain. As much as Jack hated getting sick in general, abhorred getting sick on a mission, and found it unthinkable to have his body give out on him when he needed it most, especially from something as stupid as food poisoning, riding out the course of a rough stomach bug in the equally miserable company of his friends and kicking butt at the same time made him feel slightly better. He curled up around his basin and closed his eyes, listening to his friends do the same.

"Like I said, the team that pukes together…"

"…shut up, Jack."

Giving in to sleep, Jack smiled. It really was not so miserable after all.


	7. G is for Grief

G is for Grief

It took a moment to find him amidst the hustle of the room. He was standing in the back corner by an all too quiet cot, his back to the rest of the crowd, hands holding onto the hand of the tiny figure half shrouded in a blanket with his head bowed. Jack wove around the clusters of families surrounding the cots ringing the room and came to stand next to him, placing a hand on his shoulder and calling his name softly.

"Daniel?" One look at the man and Jack was kicking himself that he hadn't checked in with him earlier on in the four-day nightmare. He looked as pale as the body on the cot. Dark circles smudged beneath his red-rimmed eyes.

"Hey. How's it going?" Jack winced at the lack of expression on Daniel's face and thought back over the past few days.

The nightmare had begun on Tuesday. They'd gated into a planet not too far off civilization-wise from Earth, but much more limited as far as resources and technology had gone. The inhabitants of the planet had been more than welcoming, proudly showing them around the city closest to the gate. It was after dinner that the trouble began.

The lengthy tour was winding up at the children's hospital, a medical facility that seemed to combine what looked like Eastern traditional medicine and the beginnings of a basic understanding of Western medicine with very few resources and technology. They'd been showing appreciation for and interest in the planet's equivalent of an emergency room when the first children started being brought in. Each one had the same symptoms: extremely high fever and dehydration from sweat, vomiting, and diarrhea that all too quickly progressed to violent seizures which rendered the children non-responsive and either caused so much brain damage that they were unable to breathe on their own and passed away or the children's hearts stopped from hypovolemic shock.

After the second child, Jack had sent Teal'c to dial home for help. A medical team in full protective gear had arrived and set to work. SG1 had stayed behind to help. Over the course of the four days, they'd fallen into separate roles. Jack had stationed himself with the triage crew, helping to direct patients and families where they needed to go, keep things relatively calm, and try to plan ahead for how to deal with the crises as they came. He'd delegated Teal'c to supplies, the strength of the Jaffa a boon to the dire need to ferry medical equipment from the gate to the hospital and around the hospital itself. He'd sent Carter back to Earth with the samples of blood from the effected children and hope for a cure or at least an answer to what was causing so much death. Daniel had asked to stay with the families and provide support. Jack had been hesitant at first. It was a lot to take on and he wasn't sure how much worse things were going to get, but Daniel had been insistent. Looking at the haggard, exhausted man swaying in front on him, still gripping the hand of a long-dead patient, Jack doubted his decision to give in and let Daniel play therapist/undertaker.

As he negotiated, directed, and delegated over the course of the four days, he'd kept an eye on Daniel. He'd seen him kneeling next to the ill children, speaking softly and calmly, getting them to smile if not laugh and helping them to feel safe and comfortable in the space that was more of a morgue than an emergency department. He'd watched him hold up mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, and uncles as they wept around the bedsides of the very same children hours later as the disease progressed. At some point, it seemed he'd found some paint and was ripping pages from his notebook on which he'd pressed the painted palms of the deceased, handing the treasured prints to the families as keepsakes, some small way to hold onto their children after their passing. The next time he'd passed through, Jack noticed that Daniel had found extra sheets somewhere and was helping the families to shroud the bodies, lovingly tucking them in one last time and waiting vigil with the corpses as the families found transportation to bring their children home. Jack had been impressed.

If he was honest with himself, the reason he'd let Daniel do all that on his own, the reason he'd stationed himself largely outside the chaos where action was largely in the abstract sense was because seeing child after child after child seize, go limp, and die was too much. Images of Charlie kept popping up unannounced and unbidden whenever he'd paused, so whirling around telling other people what to do and keeping his hands out of it and his emotions in check had been Jack's way of coping with the massive tragedy unfolding in their midst. Looking at the shell of a man in front of him, Jack felt overcome with guilt. In withdrawing from the action, he'd left Daniel totally without support and, Daniel being Daniel, he'd pushed himself to the point of collapse as usual.

"Carter and the egg heads found a medication that should start helping and made some sort of vaccine. The medical team is rolling it out now. Our work here is done. Time to go." Daniel blinked blearily back at him. Jack wondered if he'd slept in the past four days.

"We… we can't." Jack sighed. Daniel's right hand tightened around the hand of the little girl on the cot, his left smoothing her hair so that it lay neatly on her head.

"Daniel…Daniel, look at me. We've got to go. There's nothing more we can do here." Daniel wasn't making eye contact, instead turning and looking around the room at the other cots. There were ten other children who had yet to pass away and the medical team was seeing to their needs.

"They're getting help. We can go. Come on. You've done enough." Daniel turned back to the girl on the cot, rearranging her sheet.

"No. Not yet." Jack was glad to see Teal'c appear behind Daniel. He put a hand on Daniel's shoulder.

"We may take our leave, Daniel Jackson. This child's family has returned." As Teal'c spoke, the mother and father of the child Daniel had been standing with also appeared behind him. Daniel passed the little girl's hand off to her mother and, bowing his head, acquiesced to following Jack and Teal'c from the room.

Jack let Teal'c take point and kept pace with Daniel to make sure the man wasn't about to fall over. He was walking far slower than normal, but he made it to the gate. Jack dialed home, not entirely sure he could trust Daniel to hit the right symbols on the DHD. One look at the three of them on the ramp and Hammond had sent them straight home by way of the infirmary. He'd been abreast of the situation throughout the four-day nightmare. The debriefing could wait.

He'd found Daniel after the mandatory medical check. Janet had taken him aside and suggested in not so many words that she didn't think Daniel should be on his own that evening and Jack had agreed with her, more so after he found him lurking blank-faced in the doorway to his own office, facing into the darkness of the room.

"Daniel?" He hadn't responded to his own name initially, though when Jack repeated it he jumped slightly and turned around as if pulled from his own thoughts. Jack suspected his thoughts rivaled the darkness of the office in front of him. He knew from experience. It was hard to think of anything else when you'd watch a bunch of children die.

"Come on." He knew better than to give Daniel a choice in the matter. If he'd asked him to come over or if he wanted pizza and beer, he knew Daniel would have turned him down. It was obvious the man was all kinds of hurting and he knew, both from his own experience and from seeing Daniel in this level of mental anguish, that the man would both want to be alone, replaying the last few days events on a never-ending loop in his head, and want to be with anyone doing anything else all at the same time.

Daniel didn't say anything, but followed Jack out of the SGC and over to Jack's car, sitting in the copilot seat on autopilot. Jack drove back to his house in silence, letting Daniel brood, taking in the way the light of the sunset dappled the passing trees on Earth in much of the same way it had on the planet and the sounds and sights of children playing outside in the evening, very much alive and well. He didn't have to ask to know that it was likely Daniel was bargaining angrily with the massive scale of the universe, asking how it was that these children lived while those children died, that these children were born in a part of the planet that had resources to sustain them and so many didn't have the same privilege - the kids on that planet, the kids he'd met overseas on digs who lived in hovels, the kids who were malnourished, impoverished, and died for stupid reasons like diarrhea.

He'd let Daniel into the house, ordered a pizza, and opened a few beers by the time Daniel had said another word. They were sitting up on top, looking at the stars.

"We have to go back." In Jack's borrowed coat, Daniel looked a bit like a child himself, the sleeves too long rolled back to expose his hands and the collar, turned up against the chill, coming up to the top of his ears. Jack had kept his reservations about coming up to the roof to himself. Daniel was definitely in a fair bit of anguish, but he wasn't suicidal. That statement was testament enough. Jack took a long pull from his beer.

"Why?" Daniel shot him a hurt look that was clearly visible despite the darkness.

"You know Hammond is going to press you for a reason to go back in the morning. If that's really what you want to do, and I get it, you're still going to have to sell it. He put a lot of man-hours and resources into that planet already, ourselves included. So, why?" Daniel shrunk deeper into the borrowed coat and wrapped his arms around himself.

"They don't have anyone else. They need help." Jack drank some more of his beer and fixed his eyes on Venus. She was glowing brightly just above the horizon.

"They have each other and they have the meds and vaccines Carter and the eggheads whipped up." He heard Daniel let out something halfway between a sigh and a growl.

"It's too much for them to deal with on their own, Jack! There were so many of them, so many kids. It's too much to ask, too much to deal with. They haven't even started burying them yet." An image of Charlie's funeral popped unbidden into his mind's eye, the casket, so small and layered with flowers, lowering into the earth amid the drizzle of rain.

"And it's not too much to ask of you?" Jack heard Daniel make a different sort of noise and he shifted his gaze away from the heavens to the younger man who was trying to pretend he wasn't crying.

"Daniel… Look, you're only human, okay? What we saw just now on that mission was something no one should see. You're right. It's too much to deal with. Hell, one child dying is too much to deal with. I know that all too well." Jack paused for a minute, trying to figure where he was going with this spiel. Daniel had stopped trying to pretend he wasn't crying and was now wiping the tears and snot on the sleeve of Jack's coat.

"What you did for those children, what you did for those families was good work, Daniel. You did good." Daniel was crying harder now, head buried in his hands. Jack wasn't sure if it was his fault or if it was just that Daniel had finally relaxed enough that all the tears he hadn't shed in the past few days were catching up to him.

"I get that you want to go back. I do… but you don't have to. You did enough." Daniel was sobbing. Part of Jack hoped that the pizza man didn't come at this exact moment for worry that the gentleman would think Jack had wounded some sort of animal on his roof and the other part couldn't care less.

He shifted on the bench and closed the distance between them, putting an anchoring arm around the younger man. They sat together for a while until his sobbing stopped, Jack finding Mars in the sky and trying to figure out as many constellations as he could to prevent the images and memories that threatened to pop up – Charlie's first birthday, the finger paint paintings he'd made that looked so similar to the prints he'd seen Daniel make of the deceased, his first baseball practice, the time he'd been home, sick in bed and Charlie had taken it upon himself to try and play doctor…

A distant echo from the doorbell pulled Jack from his stargazing trip down memory lane and he scrambled down from the roof to collect the pizza. When he'd gotten back inside the front door, Daniel had relocated to the living room, curled up on the couch with a brand new pair of beers, still dwarfed in Jack's coat. Jack handed him some pizza and made himself comfortable in the nearby armchair with the beer. They ate in silence. Eventually, Jack turned on the hockey game but kept it at a low enough volume that he hoped Daniel would feel he was still welcome to talk if that's what he needed to do.

"I couldn't save them." He said it so quietly that Jack barely heard it over the television. Jack cast a glance from the screen to the couch. Daniel was curled up, half asleep from the combination of alcohol, a full stomach, and the past few days. His eyes were shut, but it was clear he was still at least slightly awake.

"That wasn't your job, Daniel." Daniel shifted and curled more tightly into Jack's coat.

"I couldn't save a bunch of kids, couldn't save Sha're and Skaara…" Daniel shook his head and sighed, the names of many others caught up in the exhaled breath. Jack sighed in response.

"Look, Daniel, you can't save everyone. Like you said, it's too much to ask and it's not your job, anyway. You can have a pity party if you want, but it's not going to change that fact." Daniel crossed his arms over himself and stuck out his lower lip. His eyes were still closed and, despite the arm crossing and lip sticking, he was rather limp. It was clear that he was teetering on the verge between sleep and self-pity.

"Did you make all those kids sick?" Daniel shook his head.

"Did you get in the way of their medical care and prevent them from receiving some sort of medication or whatever that could have cured them?" Daniel shook his head again.

"Did you have a way to save them?" Daniel looked thoughtful for a moment and muttered something that sounded like Tok'ra under his breath.

"The Tok'ra wouldn't have taken on all those kids. They need hosts, yes, but the fact of the matter is that they choose hosts who benefit them in some way. Those people didn't have anything but warm bodies to give as far as they were concerned. If you're thinking of Reetou Charlie, I'm sure the reason they agreed to that was 10% Jacob and 90% wanting to get more information about the Reetou." Daniel curled impossibly more tightly into Jack's coat and it struck Jack that perhaps the man was cold. He stood and grabbed the blanket off the back of the couch, draping it over the younger man.

"I stand by what I said earlier, Daniel. You did enough, more than enough. Let someone else carry the weight of the world for a while." Jack wasn't sure if it was the conversation or the warmth of the blanket, but by the time he sat back in the armchair, Daniel was fast asleep. He knew this was just the beginning of the effect of the past few days. They'd be reliving it all in the briefing in the morning and Daniel would be dreaming about it and thinking about it for a while. He couldn't offer much, but he could be there for him and maybe, just maybe it would be enough.


	8. H is for Harassment

H is for Harassment

They'd been on the planet for a few days before the storm hit. It was a planet similar to Earth in everything but terrain. Technology, culture, and language-wise, the stargate seemed to be placed in a part of this world quite like America, if not for the fact that everything was a desert. With the exception of an outpost which boasted, in the colonel's words, "big honking space guns", the majority of the rest of the civilization was underground, the maze of tunnels and caverns providing escape from the heat, wind, and sand of the desert planet's surface.

Sam had stayed behind when the rest of the team had left to investigate the outpost, eager to learn more about the way the underground civilization grew hydroponic food, powered extensive generators with a combination of solar and naquadah-based technology, cycled oxygen into the tunnel systems, and rigged a massive water collection and filtration system to harvest water droplets from condensation. One of the scientists from the planet's government had volunteered to show her around. Despite her desire to learn more about the way the people of the planet managed their resources, Sam felt like she would much rather be slogging through the sand storm or sheltering at the remote outpost with the rest of her team than stuck with Uther.

There was something about Uther that gave her the creeps, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it. He looked like a normal guy, like he would have fit in anywhere on Earth. There wasn't even anything remarkable that stood out about him in a way that she could describe him. He was plainly and utterly normal, unremarkable, and yet, whenever they found themselves in a more remote part of the tunnel system, alone in the various labs, or even sometimes when they were not completely alone, Sam felt the hairs on the back of her neck start to rise like little red flags.

Daniel, Teal'c, and the Colonel had been gone for two days. Sam knew that, initially, the plan had been to get to the outpost, tour it, spend the night, and return by the evening of the second day, but word had reached them underground that a powerful sandstorm had delayed the expedition and they would be back at a later, undetermined time. She ground her teeth as they entered yet another windowless room of seemingly endless rows of little green, leafy plants glowing eerily in their grow lights, trying to ignore the knot in her stomach growing at the thought of more days without her team and more days alone with Uther.

"What is the food like on your planet? Is it grown in this way?" By this point, they had exhausted the topics Sam had intended to learn about. Even if she had been absolutely gung-ho about the subject, there were only so many questions she could ask and so many hours she could listen to the details of hydroponic farming. Uther had shifted from supplying information in response to her questions to questioning her. While she was tired of hydroponics, the red flag hairs on the back of her neck were spreading.

"Um, no. There's a wide variety. Some food is grown in a somewhat similar way, but our planet has areas with soil and the ability to farm." Sam moved away from Uther, farther down the row of suspended plants. Uther watched her, rubbing his thumb and forefinger on the leaves of one of the plants. Sam found it creepy.

"Do you farm? Do you have, what was it Dr. Jackson called it, a… garden?" The mention of Daniel's name sent the knot in her stomach sinking. Stupid sand storm! What she wouldn't give to have someone from her team here with her.

"No. No, I don't." Sam peered down the aisle of grow lights, trying to determine whether there was an exit on the far end of the room.

"Is there not fertile earth where you live?" Something in the way Uther said the word fertile, drawing out the first syllable like a purr set the alarm bells in Sam's brain ringing. She took a deep breath and willed herself to resist the urge to flee. He wasn't doing anything wrong. He was just asking questions. Asking questions was normal. Uther was normal. There was nothing wrong, wasn't there?

"There is. I just... uh… I don't really have time to keep a garden, just a couple houseplants but nothing big." Uther was caressing a different plant now. Sam took a few more steps away down the aisle.

"Do you live alone? No one to help you with the growing?" Uther was following her down the aisle. Sam changed direction and ducked through the swinging plants into a different aisle. Uther did the same, blocking her view of the exit. From this position, Sam could clearly see that there was nothing but a solid wall at the far end.

"How old are you, Samantha?" The way he said her name made her feel sick. Nothing had happened, but everything felt wrong. She needed to get out.

"It's a pity that you don't have any children. You would make beautiful children." Uther stepped closer to her. Sam stepped back.

"A body and a mind like yours would be such an asset to motherhood. We have ways here of helping, helping with fertility, with procreating, with creating new life. I could show them to you, too, Samantha." Uther was continuing to walk closer to her, moving his thumb and forefingers together as if caressing a leaf, hand outstretched. Sam backed up, feeling the wall come up behind her.

"We could mate. Love isn't needed here for that, Samantha, just two individuals and a quick exchange of fluids and DNA, a quick romp. What would that be like? Imagine. What a way to join two worlds." Uther was closing in. Sam waited till he was in striking distance and then, as he leaned his arms around her, she brought one knee forcefully up between his legs and pushed forward, head jutting into his chest. As he fell back, curled into a ball and howling, Sam ran for the exit.

Sprinting as fast as she could, she barely paid any attention to where she was going and quickly found herself quite lost in the tunnel system. She wandered for what felt like hours, adrenaline and anxiety fading into cold sweat and shaking hands as she replayed the past few days and the event with Uther over and over in her head. Had she been leading him on? Had she overreacted? Had she just jeopardized all trade with the planet? Where were the colonel, Daniel, and Teal'c? What would they have done? Would this have happened to them?

Lost in the anxious swirl of thoughts, she nearly jumped when she rounded a corner and came face to face with a blinding burst of light and sand as a dusty crew of people tromped into the tunnel through an open door hatch along with the bluster of wind. Surprise mingled with relief as she recognized three of the dirty faces.

"Sam!"

"Heya, Carter! What are you doing here?"

"It is most auspicious to find you in this part of the tunnels, Major Carter."

The three of them talked at once, jabbering on about the "big honking space gun" and the sand storm. She followed them, glad of their distracting tale and thankful to be reunited. She got so caught up in the humorous story of their journey, Daniel's impression of the planet's equivalent of a camel bringing a grin to her face, that she had nearly put all thought of the day's events out of her mind until they emerged from the tunnels into the wider cavern where the gate and their accommodations were located and she saw a familiar person on the far side of the expanse. She froze.

"Sam?"

"What's going on, Carter?" Sam watched the figure walk the far side of the cavern, feeling the earlier surge of fear and adrenaline coursing once more through her. He seemed to glance her way and then disappear into a far tunnel.

"Sam?" Daniel placed a hand on her shoulder. She spun around and knocked it off instinctively, grasping his arm as if to disarm and attack.

"Woah, woah, woah, it's me, Sam, it's me." Daniel held his hands up in a passive gesture, a worried expression creasing his sand-covered face. She let go and stepped back, casting a glance back towards the tunnel where the figure had gone to confirm his exit.

"Easy there, Carter. What's going on?" Sam shook her head, unsure of what to say. The colonel's sandy face frowned. Without making eye contact, she knew he was giving her a visual once over and, she was sure, arriving at a logical conclusion.

"Major Carter, did something transpire while we were away? Are you… well?" Sam sent a silent thanks to Teal'c for the out and set about spinning a story. She knew that it would immediately be obvious that she was lying, but, standing in the middle of a cavern on a planet light years from home with three men she knew wouldn't hesitate to seek a wide range of justice on her behalf no matter the consequences, anything was better than the truth.

"Actually, uh… I'm not really feeling all that well. Now that you're back, what else do we have to do here? I'd like to get back to the SGC if possible." The colonel was giving her a look that said he knew exactly what had happened and was trying to decide if this was the time and place to ask her outright. She averted her gaze to communicate that she understood, but didn't feel comfortable discussing it.

The way the green leaves of a plant shone in the light of the cavern had her right back in the room and she lost track of the conversation until the colonel's, "Carter! Earth to Carter, Daniel's going to head back with you and report to Hammond. You can head straight to the infirmary."

Nodding and still not meeting the colonel's eyes lest he interpreted it as an opening for further discussion, she followed Daniel to the gate. He was quiet, sending her furrowed glances as they walked, clearly also putting two and two together and arriving at four. Sam ignored the worried looks. Hers was not a story she wanted to tell on this planet. She followed him up the steps, through the event horizon, and onto the familiar metal ramp of the SGC. She wasn't listening when Hammond and Daniel talked and not paying attention when instructions were given and she left the gate room, but somehow found herself sitting down on a chair in Janet's office in the infirmary.

Janet had been charting all morning. The patients who'd been in the infirmary overnight had been released and no new teams were scheduled to leave nor arrive for the remainder of the day, so she was thankful for a moment of quiet to tackle the backlog of documenting pre and post mission physicals and collection of notes on discharged patients. The sound of the scrape of chair legs startled her from her computer screen. Janet looked up to see the slumped form of Sam suddenly appear next to her. It didn't take years of medical training to tell that something was most definitely wrong.

"Sam?" She was focusing on a point on the far wall, her face somehow both blank and on the point of tears. She didn't look ill or injured, at least visibly while fully clothed, but Janet had learned that lesson with this particular patient long ago.

"Sam, I'm going to close the door, okay?" Janet swiveled her chair, stood, and closed the door gently. Even with the quiet click, Sam jumped. Janet winced.

"Sam, I can be here as your doctor, as your friend, or both. What do you need right now?" Sam finally shifted her focus from the far wall to Janet and Janet's heart sunk at the frightened expression in her eyes.

"I don't… I don't know." Sam cursed her voice for breaking and rubbed the tears that threatened to fall from her eyes. Janet sat back down and pushed the box of tissues closer to Sam on her desk.

"Take your time, Sam." Janet waited as Sam blew her nose and stared resolutely at her shoes, not talking. Janet frowned and changed tactics.

"Do you remember my first day, Sam? The first time we met?" Sam was still staring at her shoes. She shook her head.

"The four of you had just come back from that planet with the horse people who traded women. I had to do your post-mission physicals. You insisted that the colonel go first, then Daniel, then Teal'c. It was a while before I got to you. I spent a while talking with Teal'c. I'd never seen a Jaffa before. When the four of you came in, you'd been so fired up that it had seemed like nothing was wrong beyond the moral aspect of everything you'd seen, but by the time I got to you, I think your outrage and adrenaline had worn off and you were starting to feel the effects of what had happened. Do you remember?" Sam nodded, still silent. Janet carried on.

"It took us a while to get your shirt off you. We wound up cutting it off and soaking it to get it out of the wounds on your back. You were covered in bruises and cuts. Do you remember what you told me?" Sam shook her head.

"You said you'd gotten the cuts, the bruises, all of it defending a group of women from a monster of a man, that you'd do it again in a heartbeat, and that no one, alien or otherwise, was going to stone anyone, rape anyone, sell anyone, or make any woman feel inferior if you had anything to do about it. And I thought you were the strongest, craziest, bravest person I had ever met and desperately wanted to be your friend." Janet could see that Sam was smiling, even with her head lowered.

"So… do I need to go get my scissors?" Sam lifted her head and shook it.

"No, no scissors needed this time. He didn't touch me… much." Janet fought to keep her expression neutral, anger bubbling up for her friend.

"Much?" Sam nodded, smirk growing on her lips.

"I, uh… I let him come close enough so that I could knee him in the groin and get away." Janet smiled back.

"Atta girl!" Sam's smirk widened into a grin.

"Do you want me to do a full physical or do you want to take a long, hot shower while I finish this charting? Either option is fine and one doesn't have to preclude the other." The tension in Sam's shoulders seemed to evaporate, replaced by a thankfulness at the chance to regain full control over her body, who touched it, saw it, and what was done with and to it.

"Uh… shower sounds better right now, thanks." Janet nodded.

"In letting you go shower, I'm trusting that there isn't some wound you're not telling me about. No need for scissors, right?" Sam smiled and nodded.

"Good. Enjoy your shower. Oh and Cassie is off from school tomorrow, so we were going to do pizza and a movie tonight if you'd like to join. 7 o'clock, my treat. And the guest bed has brand new flannel sheets." Sam's smile reached all the way up to her eyes.

"Thanks, Janet. I'll see you at 7." Janet watched Sam head for the showers and then turned back to her report. Men could be monsters, on Earth and off world. She was thankful to know nearly a base full of the better kind who would take no for an answer, who'd always ask for consent, and who'd believe someone's story when they told it. She cast a glance out into the infirmary, expecting three pairs of worried, angry feet to come marching in at any second. Sam's wasn't her story to tell and she didn't know all of the facts, but she did know Sam. If one thing was for sure, not much had changed in the years since she'd first met her friend. One more handsy, disgusting monster was nothing against the strongest, craziest, bravest person she knew. Sam was going to be just fine.

The long, hot shower had felt great, as had the girl's night, one washing away the pervasive feeling of filth and the other replacing what fear and anxiety lingered with a calming solidarity and a deep, deep roll of simmering anger at what had happened to her and so many other women. She'd excused herself early from Janet and Cassie's, turning down a plate of pancakes for a pair of running shoes.

She'd been running for some time now, pavement and sweat logging miles and simultaneously replaying and regaining control over the narrative of the past few days in her head. In comparison to the fearful fleeing she'd done getting out of the room back on the planet, this footfall felt stronger, freer, empowering. This sprint was her choice and, damn, did it feel good.

She hadn't been paying attention to her route or giving it any thought at all, simply relishing the exhilarating feeling of running, and it was somehow both surprising and not at all surprising when she finally stopped to catch her breath and found herself standing in front of the colonel's house. From the street outside, she could see two cars parked in the driveway. He was home and it looked like so was Daniel and, more than likely, Teal'c. She wavered for a bit on the sidewalk. Did she want to do this? Would it be easier to talk here, off base or would the organized structure of rank, report, and duty back at the SGC put enough distance between what had happened and reality that telling her team the truth would feel like telling someone else's story?

She'd been about to turn and run back to Janet's to seek shelter back in the confines of sisterhood and the structure of the SGC when an equally sweaty, breathless figure rounded the corner. Part of her thought of sprinting instantly, not wanting to do this here, now, on the sidewalk outside of his house, but the other part found it somehow appropriate.

"Carter, out for a jog this morning, I see. Good weather for it." The colonel slowed to a walk and then stopped, keeping a good few feet away. Sam wasn't sure if he was keeping the distance because of what had happened or because they were both quite drenched in sweat and smelled, but she was glad for it.

"Daniel and Teal'c were still out cold when I left. We got in a bit late. I was going to put some coffee on and whip up some famous O'Neill omelets. You're welcome to join." Wordlessly, she followed him around the house and onto the deck, opting to perch on a deck chair instead of going inside when she spied the still sleeping form of Daniel, sprawled across the couch, snoring.

"Be right back," Jack whispered over his shoulder and disappeared through the sliding door into the darkened living room.

Sam looked out across the backyard, listening to the twittering of the birds and watching the sunlight play on the trees, their leaves just beginning to change color. These leaves looked far less sinister. This sun was warm, not artificial. She took a deep breath and grounded herself.

The sound of the sliding door behind her announced the colonel's return, two coffee cups in hand. She took the proffered cup and turned back to watch the wind dance in the branches. The colonel stood beside her, following her gaze out into the tree line.

"I'm… I'm not going to ask. Well, scratch that, technically I do have to ask, but I don't want to… It's your story to tell, Carter. I… You can tell it how you want to when you're ready… I guess I'm just saying that I'm sorry that we weren't there to help, not that you need help, but…" he trailed off, fumbling with the cup of coffee.

"I'm not good at this whole talking thing. I'd delegate to Daniel, but he took a Benadryl and he'll be asleep for a good hour or so yet, I estimate." Sam smiled into her coffee.

"No worries, sir." He turned to face her, looking a bit flustered and tense.

"You can drop the sir if it helps. This doesn't have to be official… unless you want it to be official? Ah, sorry." Sam smiled.

"Nothing happened, sir." Sam winced at the frustrated look that passed over his face.

"Carter…" She held up her hand.

"I mean, it almost happened, but I didn't let it, sir… I kicked him in the groin and got out of there before it went any farther." The frustrated look morphed into one of pride.

"Nice." Sam smiled back and then turned back to look out at the trees.

"I, uh… It's not like this whole thing hasn't happened before. I mean… the Shavadai, the academy, it's not like it's an uncommon thing. It's something I should be prepared for, I guess, I mean, it's not like…" She trailed off, hiding her gaze in her coffee.

"Carter, stop." She looked back at him. The expression of pride was mixed with anger.

"Whatever happened is not your fault and however you deal with it is up to you. You're no less a strong, intelligent woman than you were before this happened, before whatever else happened… uh… Look, he was wrong to do what he did. Uther…" Sam tensed at the mention of his name. Jack backtracked.

"That slimey asshat is lucky Teal'c and I didn't get the chance to see him or he'd be singing soprano and that would be the least of his worries." Sam smirked.

"Listen, rules dictate that we have to write up some sort of report about all this, but I checked with Janet when we got back and she's willing to check whatever boxes you want her to check, as are we. If you want people like Hammond and Davis to know what went down, we stand behind you 100%. If you'd rather this stay between us and Janet, we also stand behind you 100%. It's your call, Carter." The sound of the sliding door behind them ended the conversation, announcing the presence of a wobbly, bleary-eyed Daniel and a stone-faced Teal'c.

"Major Carter, it is good to see you well." Daniel let out a noise that was less words and more of a grunt. Jack passed him his coffee.

"Morning, guys. It's good to see you, too." Sam watched the three of them. Teal'c was silently surveying their surroundings, ever alert for signs of danger. The colonel had gone back inside and returned with more coffee that Daniel, looking more than half asleep, was downing quickly. She'd worked with, known, dated, and been around a lot of men in her life. Some of them were worse than monsters, but none of them were as loyal as these three. Whether it was a sandstorm, a firefight, or one awful individual, she knew they'd be there to support her in whatever way she asked. She wasn't sure about what to put in the report yet, but she knew that could wait till Monday. For now, there was coffee, omelets, and friendship.


	9. I is for Incisors

I is for Incisors

They'd gated to what seemed for all intents and purposes like a ghost town. Large gothic looking buildings in various states of disrepair sat in the gray gloom of the day, empty and silent. There wasn't even the sound of birds. Other than the crunch of gravel beneath their feet as they walked away from the MALP at the base of the gate and made their way into the deserted city, there was no sound whatsoever.

"Well, this is creepy." Teal'c scanned the buildings and alleyways surrounding them. There was no sign of movement.

"Indeed." With the exception of the gravel crunching under their feet, the four fell into a similar silence, broken only by the clicking and whirring of whatever device Major Carter was using to scan the area.

Teal'c continued to scan their surroundings, finding nothing, neither a clue to the disappearance of the inhabitants and fauna of the planet nor any inhabitants or creatures. Deserted carriages and carts littered the streets. It was clear that whatever had happened to cause all the people and animals to depart had happened quickly. As they progressed up what appeared to be the main road, an ominously large, stone structure rose out of the foggy horizon. Teal'c felt his symbiote move within him. There was something about this planet that was disconcerting.

"Well, that looks like it could be some sort of government or possibly religious building of some significance. If there's anything which tells us what sort of cataclysmic event caused all these people to up and disappear, my best guess tells me we'll find it in there." Teal'c surveyed the imposing structure. His symbiote moved again. This was not a place he wanted to be, but he held his ground.

"I'm not picking up any radiation, sir. I don't see why not." Major Carter and Daniel Jackson were looking to O'Neill. Teal'c thought of mentioning the motion of his symbiote and his growing sense of unease, but decided, as there was no clear cause of the matter, to keep it to himself.

With O'Neill's go ahead, they climbed the stone steps and made their way through the marble columns surrounding the gaping doorway. Teal'c tuned out Daniel Jackson's lengthy monologue about the significance of the architectural features, searching the shadows for signs of danger. With the exception of his symbiote, which rolled and writhed within him in what Teal'c interpreted as fear, no motion revealed any presence in the shadows of the space.

They continued into the structure. The gaping door gave entrance into an open space. The ceiling rose higher above their heads than Teal'c could fully see, the shadows shrouding any view of the beams. Darkness crept around the entirety of the structure. It was impossible to clearly make out the edges of the large room.

"Stay close. We go in together." O'Neill switched on his flashlight, the beam casting a blinding glow into the darkness of the space. Daniel Jackson and Major Carter followed suit, their beams bouncing and swinging over the space as they took in the details of what surrounded them. Teal'c brought up the rear, scanning the darkness that closed in behind them and shining his light into the corners and darker spaces where, if he were to have crouched to spring upon an enemy in ambush, he would have hidden.

They made it most of the way through the room when the sound started. Coming as it was into the silence of the space, it was as frightening as it was sudden and deafening. The twittering and flapping of thousands of wings descended from above and instantly they were engulfed in a writhing sea of blackness. Teal'c watched his teammates fall to their knees, flailing and shooting their weapons at the strange leather birds, before rising up and sprinting deeper into the building for a door which appeared at once in their light beams. Teal'c waved his staff weapon, downing and stunning a handful of the creatures and fired his zat'ni'katel, the blue electricity filling the space with a burst of light like lightening and revealing a terrible reality – the creatures were everywhere.

He followed his teammates' route to the door, still waving his staff like a club and firing his zat. He was but a few feet away when he felt a creature make landfall on his right shoulder and instantaneously sink its teeth into his neck. He howled with a combination of rage, pain, and fear, continuing to run in the hopes that the creature would let go before everything went black.

O'Neill hadn't had a good feeling about this planet from the moment the MALP footage had come back through. On the screen back at the SGC, it had looked like a bad movie set for some kind of Victorian dystopian film, but something about the place had intrigued Daniel and Sam, unsurprisingly, and so, despite the bad feeling that had lodged itself securely in his gut like so much bad guacamole, he'd gone along with the mission. And here they were.

The instant he'd heard the sound, he knew what was about to happen – bats, lots and lots of bats. He hadn't had time to get the word out before they were upon them. They were surprisingly large and vicious, but then again he supposed he couldn't hold alien bats to the same standards as those of the earth variety. The sheer force of their descent drove them initially to the ground before they were able to get to the door at the far end of the room. Daniel made it to the door first, shouldering it open. Sam followed him inside. Jack turned back in the doorframe in time to see a bat latch onto Teal'c who continued running, letting out a howl that echoed through the space and sent all but the bat biting into him fluttering off to the ceiling above.

Thinking quickly and not wanting to hurt Teal'c, Jack switched his P90 for his zat and shot the pair of them. Teal'c crumpled to the ground, the bat detaching and landing beside him with a thunk. Keeping an eye out for any stragglers, he darted back out into the room, grabbing Teal'c by his vest and lugging him back through the door, trying not to look too closely at the giant, unconscious alien bat beside him.

"Teal'c!"

"What happened?"

Carter and Daniel's hands grabbed Teal'c's arms and helped to pull him up and onto a soft, couch-like sitting place. Jack felt for a pulse and then peered at the wound. Teal'c's heart was beating strongly, he was clearly breathing, and there was what looked like a deep, bifurcated puncture mark on the right of his neck. A spider web of purple, bruised vein marks stretched away from the two holes. Jack frowned and dragged a hand over his own neck. Some horror movie this was shaping up to be.

"One of the bats got him. I had to zat them both."' Jack took a step back and let Carter inspect the wound. Daniel bobbed in between, trying to see as well.

"What do you mean it got him? Bats generally don't cause any harm. I mean, they don't generally… Oh, wow, that looks like… Well, um, as far as I know bats aren't really, uh, well, they don't…" Daniel trailed off, his hands echoing Jack and coming to feel the same spot on his own neck before he gathered himself enough to ask a question Jack suspected all of them were thinking and didn't want to say.

"Is it just me or does that look an awful lot like a vampire bite?" Jack sighed. Carter stood up, a grim frown on her face.

"I'm not really sure what to make of it, sir. I mean, if it were a snake bite, we would try to keep him as immobile as possible and get him back to the gate ASAP so the infirmary could try and give him some sort of antivenom, but this doesn't look like that kind of thing. The bruising around the puncture makes it look less like a venomous injection site and more like a, well, a suck, sir." Carter bit her lip and dragged her hand through her hair.

"So… that's a yes?" Jack shot Daniel a glare.

"I agree, Carter. The question is should we be waiting here for him to come around or dragging him back to the gate?" Carter bit her lip more forcefully and cast a worried glance at Teal'c.

"Your guess is as good as mine, sir. Even in advanced field medicine, this isn't a topic we covered." Jack gave her a reassuring nod and peeked at the wound again. He didn't have the first clue of what to do.

"Well, I think the question also is what will they do with him when we bring him to the infirmary? Remember what happened that time with the really big bug that stung him in the back? We'll have to be on the look out for the NID." Jack shot another glare at Daniel who had moved away from the three of them and was thumbing his way through a book he'd picked up off the bookcase.

"Yes, thank you for that lovely reminder, Daniel, let's hope he's not about to transform into a giant bat this time." Jack continued to glare at Daniel's "who me?" face and then looked around the room they found themselves sheltering in. Rows and rows of old, dust covered books lined and intersected the room, broken up by equally dusty tables ringed in chairs and couches like the one behind him on which they'd laid Teal'c. There was no mistaking it. It was a library. No wonder Daniel was getting cocky and making off handed comments…

"Sir, I think we ought to decide what we're doing soon. He's getting cold." Carter had taken her coat off and had draped it around Teal'c. Jack added his to the pile.

"Shock?" Daniel added his as well. Carter nodded.

"Okay, so we bring him back to the SGC ASAP. We just have to make sure the rest of us don't get bit when we go." Carter nodded again, checking Teal'c's pulse.

"Right and how are we going to do that exactly?" Jack glared at Daniel.

"I mean… The bats didn't descend on us until we were a long ways into the room and until we had our flashlights on. Do you think, uh, never mind, it's probably not right. Bats use echolocation." Daniel fingered the book he had in his hands.

"Ah, ah, ah, alien bats, Daniel, alien bats – go on." Daniel ran his hand back over his neck and stared at Teal'c.

"I think I know where you're going, Daniel. These bats seemed attracted to us once we had light and were making sound." Jack ran a hand through his hair.

"Exactly, so we need to get out of here and get to the gate without making any sound and while using as little light as possible so they don't detect us." Jack looked at the unconscious Jaffa. There was no way they were getting him out of there silently.

"Yes or we use that to our advantage and create a diversion that would buy us enough time to get out of here." Jack smiled at his 21C and then looked around the room at what they had to work with.

"Fire. We'll make a bonfire to direct their attention and run like hell. Daniel, pick the best books to burn. We'll need more than a couple." Daniel let out a strangled, anguished noise and fixed Jack with the most shocked, hurt expression he'd seen in a while. Jack smirked.

"Kidding. Get your flares out, kids. It's time for a rave." Jack fished around in Teal'c's pack for his flare and found the one in his own, handing them to Daniel. Carter took Daniel and Jack's radios, jamming them so that, when the buttons were depressed and the radios tossed into the space, they created an ear-splitting, incessant whine.

With a nod, Jack took Teal'c's right arm and lugged him upright. Daniel came under his left. Carter cracked open the door and tossed out a radio into the farthest corner followed by a flare to the opposite corner. The twittering and fluttering announced their presence once more and the bats descended upon the flung objects, dividing themselves and making a clear path.

"Go, go, go!" Jack whispered, following Carter out into the room with Teal'c and Daniel and watching with bated breath as the flares and radios she flung kept the bats' attention until they were out into the gray glow of the deserted street.

"Keep it moving!" he urged, dragging Teal'c on and not wanting to know if the bats had figured out the ruse and were on their tail.

Carter sprinted ahead, dialing the gate, entering her IDC, and standing ready to provide cover. Jack and Daniel dragged Teal'c through the street and up the steps to the gate before he heard the first flapping behind him.

"Go, go, go!" He dropped Teal'c's weight from his shoulder and shoved Teal'c and Daniel through the event horizon, turning to zat cover fire as Carter bobbed and weaved, dodging bats and diving through the gate. He quickly followed her in.

"Close the iris! Shut it down!" he hollered, hitting the ramp next to Carter with a thud. He heard the iris scissor closed followed by a series of pings before the gate disengaged.

Dusting himself off, he climbed to his feet and carried on down the ramp to where a medical team was seeing to Teal'c under Daniel's watchful hovering. Hammond stood next to Daniel at the end of the ramp.

"What happened out there, colonel?"

"Bats, sir, lots of bats and not the friendly kind." Jack watched as Teal'c was loaded onto a stretcher and whisked off to the infirmary.

"I see. Was anyone else injured?" Hammond smiled as Jack, Daniel, and Sam paled slightly and put their hands to their necks in unison, checking themselves for a bite.

"No, sir."

"No."

"Yeah, no, I think we're good." Hammond nodded.

"Go get yourselves checked over in the infirmary. We'll debrief when you're cleared." Hammond watched the three remaining members of his flagship team leave the gate room and shook his head. Of all the things he'd expected to deal with that morning, alien bats were not on his list.

Jack waited in one of the ridiculously uncomfortable plastic infirmary chairs, watching the hubbub of people flowing in and out of the hallway to the isolation room and trying to decide if it was a good or bad sign as far as Teal'c was concerned. Daniel was shifting next to him, one leg jiggling anxiously. Carter sat silently on the other side of Daniel, arms crossed with a focused, determined expression. Jack tried to think of a way to break the silence. Silence hadn't been a harbinger of good things so far that day.

He'd been racking his brain for some sort of comment sure to set off a spiel from one or both of the science twins when Janet appeared around the corner of the hallway. She didn't look happy, but she wasn't overtly upset either. Jack decided commentary could wait.

"Well, he's stable for now. How are the three of you? Was anyone else bit?" Janet watched the chorus of shaking heads and allowed herself to relax slightly.

"Good. I'm still going to recommend you all get the full course of the rabies vaccine and, given that this is an alien species exposure, I'm also going to recommend that all four of you are observed for at least the next twenty four hours." She held her hand up to silence the dissenting murmurs.

"I don't want to hear it. We have no way of predicting what will happen with Teal'c or the rest of you and given that the planet was entirely deserted except for these bats, well, it's best to be cautious. You can take turns in the infirmary showers. Clean uniforms will be brought to you here. Once you've been fully examined, you may go sit with Teal'c. I will have extra cots wheeled into the isolation room. You will not leave the infirmary until it has been reasonably determined that none of you are adversely affected." To be honest, she had expected more resistance from the three of them, especially the colonel, but she was thankful not to have to bother as the three of them dutifully lined up by the infirmary bathroom and followed her instructions, grabbing biohazard bags for their off world uniforms.

Jack made his way into the isolation room, awkwardly trying to stretch as he walked. The first intramuscular shot of the rabies vaccine had hurt and he wasn't looking forward to sitting down. He cast a glance up to the observation area, thankful to see that it was deserted. Something about being constantly watched made the gut feeling he'd had that morning in the briefing room rear its head again. Carter and Daniel were already sitting on either side of Teal'c's bed. Jack came to stand at his feet. The Jaffa was still out cold.

"Alright, hit me with it. Thoughts?" Daniel and Carter looked up and began talking at once.

"Well, sir, the effects of the zat should have worn off by now, so we can reliably assume that this is the result of the bite and not the zat…"

"Given the sheer number of the bats on the planet, it's not too much of a leap to think that maybe the end stage of the bite effect is bat transformation, especially because the bats sought shelter in the structure most symbolic of power…"

"Ack!" Jack held his hands up and the twins fell silent, two pairs of blue eyes blinking back at him. He sighed.

"What's Fraiser saying? What's she thinking for Teal'c and what did she say about you two, besides the giant needle in the ass?" Jack watched as the two of them thought for a moment.

"Teal'c's blood count is low, apparently, but other than that and the whole not-being-awake thing, he's okay… for now." Carter nodded at Daniel.

"And we're fine, sir. How about you?" Jack nodded.

"I guess we just make ourselves comfortable, then." Jack pulled up a chair next to Teal'c's feet and sat down. They passed the time in a tense, but companionable silence, broken by the sharing of stories and vague speculations. At some point Janet stopped by to check in and dropped off a deck of cards, a welcome distraction from their vigil. Hammond also stopped in around lunchtime, conducting the debriefing from the isolation room's observation desk. The lunch trays sat untouched. Teal'c lay pale and unmoving between the three of them and it somehow felt wrong to be eating or doing much of anything other than watching the monitor with his vital signs.

At somewhere close to 0200, the growing feeling of unease in Jack's gut reached a nauseating level. Janet and Hammond had long since gone home, though they promised to return immediately if there was a change in Teal'c's condition. The night staff had taken more precautions with the four of them, entering and exiting to isolation room in full protective covering. He was about to ask if there was something the three of them should know about when the klaxons blared and the lights cut out, power generators whining on.

"Well, things just keep getting and better and better, don't they?"

As if to confirm his statement, Kinsey appeared in the observation area. Jack elbowed Daniel who had nodded off and cleared his throat, nodding his head toward the slimy voyeur. Daniel startled awake and, upon seeing Kinsey, made a noise under his breath that echoed the level of disgust in Carter's facial expression.

"Good evening, SG-1. The Jaffa Teal'c is to be remanded to government custody, effective immediately. I expect you three not to resist if you know what's good for him… and for you. I'd hate for something to happen." Jack stood and fixed Kinsey with the deadliest glare he could, walking towards him. He hoped Carter and Daniel would somehow catch the opportunity to manufacture a defense while he stalled.

"That's not going to happen. Teal'c isn't going anywhere." Kinsey was taking the bait. He fixed his beady little eyes on Jack and paid no attention to whatever motion Jack picked up in his periphery.

"We have a direct order, permission from the president himself, colonel." Jack scoffed.

"Yeah, well, no one here voted for that shrub. And, anyway, Teal'c and the rest of us are staying put here in this very spot for the next few hours. Doctor's orders." Jack listened to the sound of tinkering behind him and hoped whatever the two of them were doing would be enough.

"The order on record is for you all to be under medical observation. There will be plenty of doctors where he's going." The lights flickered on again, went out for a second time, and then flickered back onto generator power. Jack heard Carter swear softly and spared a glance. She was shaking her right hand as if it were numb, but otherwise looked unharmed as she sat back down in the chair she'd been occupying at Teal'c's side. It didn't look like Daniel had moved. He was watching Teal'c's monitor with a concerned expression. Jack bit his lip.

There was a failed entry sound at the keypad on the other side of the isolation room door followed by a loud banging. Jack looked over to Carter who was smiling slightly.

"I order you to open that door immediately, colonel." Kinsey was getting all hot and red. Jack grinned.

"Looks like whatever's going on with the power must have done something. Hmmm. Too bad, Kinsey, I guess we're all just going to stay here and…" Teal'c's monitor starting beeping wildly.

"What's going on?" Jack ignored Kinsey and hurried back over to where Daniel and Carter stood over Teal'c.

"Guys?" Daniel sent him a panicked look. Carter was taking his pulse, confirming what was going on with the screen.

"Uh… His blood pressure is dropping a lot? And his heart is going really fast? I think?" Jack looked to Carter who nodded, confirming Daniel's layman description.

"Why?" Daniel shrugged. Carter sighed and ran her hand through her hair, clearly weighing the cons of having essentially just barricaded them in without any medical personnel.

"My best guess is that it has something to do with his blood. Last they checked it was dropping even lower. If it drops too low, his blood pressure bottoms out and well… It's like bleeding out, sir." Jack let out a breath and echoed the hair gesture.

"Okay, okay… What do we do? It's not like we have anything here to give him." Daniel was opening and closing cabinets around them in a frenzy as if a random bag of blood would be sitting and waiting for them to transfuse it.

"Well, actually, sir, we do have blood. I'm B positive. What type are you?" Jack let out a low breath. That just might work.

"AB negative… Daniel?"

"Um…. O? O positive?" Jack frowned at him.

"Why are you saying that like a question? Are you O positive or not?" Daniel made an anguished face.

"Ah… I can't remember. It's either O positive or negative, but definitely O." Jack looked at Carter.

"Daniel, that matters. You don't have any idea?" Daniel drummed his fingers on his thigh and let out a panicked breath.

"I think it's positive. I'm positive…. What does it matter, though? It's not like we have the capabilities to do a blood draw and the whole processing it thing in here anyway." Carter rummaged through the drawers of medical supplies in which Daniel had been rifling, pulling out a few IV cannulas, tubing, and other things Jack didn't know the name of.

"Well, it's a risk, sir, but we could do what's sometimes called a battlefield transfusion. It's a direct blood transfusion with no banking. Daniel's blood would be best as he's the universal donor, but the problem is I'm not sure what Teal'c's blood type is as far as the Rh factor and in this type of transfusion, we wouldn't be able to necessarily know how much of Daniel's blood would go into Teal'c. I can set up a valve system so that it's single directional and Daniel won't get any of Teal'c's blood, but we won't know what the effect will be…" Teal'c's monitor let out a different pitched beep and the numbers fluctuated more wildly, cutting her off.

"I'm not sure we have another option, Carter." Nodding, Daniel rolled back his left sleeve and thrust his arm forward.

"Do it." With a speed he didn't know was possible, Carter created the single directional valve system as Jack and Daniel pushed one of the cots closer to Teal'c's. As Daniel climbed up onto the cot and lay down, Jack cast a glance up at the observation deck. Kinsey had disappeared, no doubt to bring in reinforcements. Jack frowned and sighed. That was a problem for later.

"Okay, Daniel, are you sure about this?" Daniel let out a nervous laugh and smiled at Sam. She looked more nervous than he felt, struggling to slip on a pair of gloves over what Daniel assumed were sweaty hands.

"I trust you, Sam. Do it." Giving her shoulder a squeeze with his right arm and once more extending his left, he smiled with more courage than he felt and cast a glance at the impossibly pale Jaffa next to him.

"Alright." Sam whispered under her breath, talking herself through the steps as she placed the tourniquet on both their arms, cleaned the area, and inserted the needle and cannula. Jack hovered over it all at their feet, wincing with Daniel as the needle slid into his vein and dark red blood flowed with speed through the mass of valves and tubing to where an identical needle sat in the crook of Teal'c's right elbow.

"Nice, Carter, only one stick!" Sam smiled and blushed.

"Yeah, Sam. Next time I have to have an IV, I know who to ask." Daniel wriggled the fingers of his left hand and bent his knees up, laying back and watching with strange fascination as his blood left his body and entered Teal'c's. The monitor, which had been continuously beeping, quieted as Teal'c's vitals stabilized.

"It's working. We won't know whether or not the transfusion will cause more problems than help for a bit, but hopefully by then, Janet'll be back." Jack nodded absently and cast a glance up at the clock by the still empty observation deck – 0300. They had about 3 hours, maybe 2 before Hammond and Janet returned.

Jack turned back to Daniel and pulled up a chair between the two beds. Carter paced back and forth between the two patients, taking Daniel's pulse and eyeing Teal'c's monitor. They were quiet for a while as the minutes passed on and color began to return to Teal'c's cheeks.

"You know, this really is fascinating." Jack looked over at Daniel. He was starting to look pretty pale.

"Oh yeah?" Daniel was shivering a bit. Jack covered him with the blanket at the foot of the cot and made eye contact with Carter who shrugged. It was a bit chilly in the room.

"Well, admittedly, I'm not too read up on vampire lore, but this whole process falls totally in line with what I know, at least the whole Dracula-based side of things. Teal'c got bit, was weakened or whatever, and fell into a deep sleep. A few hours later, long enough, say, for the night to transition into day if he were to have been bitten during the hours of night when stereotypically people in vampire lore were bitten and for the sun to rise, he makes a dramatic turn for the worse, the only solution for which is blood from someone else. While I'm not saying that the bats on that planet were vampires and that Teal'c is turning into one, it definitely is fascinating." Jack shook his head.

"I don't know, Daniel. Teal'c isn't sparkly yet." Daniel raised an eyebrow and Carter sent Jack a surprised look.

"What?" He glared. She smirked.

"Sparkly, sir? I didn't realize you were into the whole Twilight genre." Jack was about to comment back about having had to put up with a whole car ride long description of the saga from Cassie when he drove her home from school the other day when Carter's smirk dropped.

"Carter?" She stepped in front of Jack, feeling for Daniel's pulse.

"Daniel?" The now exceptionally pale man let out an unintelligible noise and his eyelids fluttered closed. Jack shook his foot till he opened his eyes.

"Stop that, Daniel. Stay with us." Carter swore under her breath and set about detaching the line connecting the two of them.

"Hold pressure and keep this up, sir," she said, handing Daniel's frighteningly limp left arm to Jack with a wad of gauze at the venipuncture sight, moving to Teal'c to remove the line from his arm.

"Daniel, keep talking. Tell us more about vampires." Daniel fixed him with an unfocused gaze and said nothing. Jack looked over at Carter. Now what were they going to do?

Just as Jack was about to well and truly panic, the door to the isolation room slid open and Janet and a cluster of medical team members rushed in, followed by Hammond and Kinsey. It took about thirty seconds for Janet to accurately interpret what was happening. By the time she had crossed the room from the doorway to the beds, she was shouting for three units of O positive blood and starting an IV in Daniel's right arm. Jack stepped back as the whirlwind of medical people descended. By the time he had an ounce of a grasp of what was happening, Daniel had two IVs, someone else's blood was flowing happily into one arm while saline flowed in the other, and Teal'c was coming around.

"Colonel, General," Janet called, summoning them to Teal'c's side. They left Kinsey waffling between the medical team, Daniel, and Teal'c and came around to where the diminutive doctor directed. Teal'c blinked slowly and squinted up at O'Neill.

"O'Neill, what has transpired?" Jack squeezed Teal'c's hand and glanced over at Carter who was holding Daniel's hand as he blinked woozily up at the pair of them. Teal'c squeezed back.

"Bats, Teal'c, bats… What do you remember?" Teal'c frowned for a moment.

"Many creatures descending like a cloud of shadows. I was bitten." Jack nodded.

"Indeed you were, bat man, but you've got probably too many pints of Daniel swimming through you now, so we think you'll be okay, right doc?" Jack made eye contact with Janet and smiled sheepishly. She looked about ready to punch someone.

"Probably too many? Probably, colonel? When normal people donate blood, they donate a pint. Given the shape Daniel's in, my guess is he just gave Teal'c about three or four pints. There's a reason for the whole donation process beyond the HIV testing." Jack spared a glance at Carter who looked equally sheepish.

"But you probably did save Teal'c's life… and the wound seems to have closed. We'll have to keep the three of you here for observation for a while longer, especially Teal'c and Daniel, to make sure things are headed in a proper direction. How are you feeling Teal'c?" Janet moved around Teal'c, taking his vitals.

"I am much improved." Janet nodded.

"Glad to hear it. Sir…" Hammond held up his hand and turned to Kinsey.

"As you can see, senator, we have things completely under control and no members of SG1 pose any danger to the safety of this base whatsoever. Your order is invalid. You may go." Kinsey turned bright red and looked like he was about to press the issue. Hammond stood his ground.

"Was I unclear, senator?" Kinsey harrumphed out of the room. Hammond turned back to SG1, shaking his head.

"I apologize for our delay in returning. We would have been here an hour ago if it were not for Kinsey and his minions detaining the good doctor and myself. I'm glad things were in control, within reason." Hammond spared a glance at Daniel who nodded, still far too pale, but definitely more with it.

Hammond took leave of them, followed by the majority of the medical team as the activity died down. Janet hovered for a while, checking to make sure no one was about to do anything surprising, before heading off to see other patients. Carter pulled over and curled up on a cot next to Daniel, who waltzed the line between wakefulness and sleep. Jack remained in the uncomfortable chair next to Teal'c, staring a hole in the clock on the wall. It was almost time for breakfast.

"O'Neill, I have one question." Jack spared a glance from the ticking hands to look down at Teal'c.

"Yeah, T?" Teal'c inclined his head and smirked.

"What is a bat man?" Jack heard snickers erupting from the neighboring cots and smiled.

"A most honorable vigilante who solves crime in Gotham city. He's… known for his affinity for bats. There's movies and comic books about him. I'm sure Daniel can hook you up." Daniel let out a scoff from his cot.

"What makes you think I have Batman movies and comics lying around my place?" Jack was about to quip about solving riddles, saving lives, or about how Daniel must take pointers on being an annoying, but somehow helpful companion from Robin when Carter piped up, her words half muffled by her pillow.

"I've got a bunch if you're really interested, Teal'c, but you have to get to know Wonder Woman first." Jack shook his head and joined Daniel and Carter in a lengthy discussion of comic books and super heroes.

Lying in the isolation room listening to his teammates banter about something they referred to as DC and Marvel, Teal'c smiled. Whether they were battling the Goa'uld, assaulted by shadowy, vampiric bird creatures with nearly deadly incisors, or warding off evil senators, Teal'c was glad to be surrounded by his closest friends….

"Oh and Teal'c, next time you see Cassie, you have to wear body glitter."

… even if he didn't always understand their sense of humor

Author's note - despite research, I couldn't find anything anywhere about SG1's blood types nor is it mentioned in any episode per my recollection. I chose blood types based on their characteristics. Daniel being Daniel was an obvious choice for the universal donor, given his self-sacrificing nature. I knew Jack had to be a rare blood type given how rare of a guy he is, especially with his Ancient gene. I chose B for Sam as I wanted hers to be rare, but not too rare. Teal'c's blood type isn't mentioned, as if Daniel/a type O donor donates, it doesn't have to be a perfect match and I figured his symbiote would make up for the Rh factor difference if there were one. I'd love to hear if others know the blood types or if they have conflicting ideas about what blood type SG1 might have. Thanks!


	10. J is for Jungle

J is for Jungle

Jack gazed up at the cluster of stars peeking through the canopy of foliage in the predawn glow and sighed before smacking the back of his neck to kill a mosquito. Despite the high strength bug spray he'd coated himself with, he was getting eaten alive this watch. At least it had stopped raining.

They'd gated to the planet a few days ago and, as far as Jack was concerned, had definitely outstayed their welcome. It was thus far uninhabited as far as they could tell. The weather alone was a testament to why. The humidity had to be over 100 percent. When it wasn't an active deluge, the air was so thick and hot it rivaled the density of the forest. When he wasn't getting soaked with monsoon rain, he was sweating buckets and the planet's voracious mosquitoes had bitten him in more places than he cared to think about.

Jack was torn from ruminating on his misery by the rise of the sun and the fluttering of tent flaps announcing the arrival of the rest of his team. To his surprise, Daniel was the first to exit and Jack did a double take at the man's face. He'd evidently been a similar feast for the mosquitoes during the night. A giant, red lump protruded from just above his left eyebrow like the world's largest pimple.

"Hey there, Polyphemus." Still half asleep, Daniel answered him with a grunt and shuffled around the remains of last night's campfire to go relieve himself in privacy. Annoyed at the lack of attention to his Daniel-level Odyssey reference, Jack dug his toe into the dark, wet earth and waited.

"…What?" The confused squawk sounded from behind the nearest tree. Jack smiled.

"What?" he called back. The sound of zipping and shuffling preceded Daniel's return.

"Did you just… Did you just call me Polyphemus? Like from the Odyssey? Homer's Odyssey?" Daniel's mouth, still outlined slightly in drool from the heavy sleep he was clearly struggling to shake, was hanging open slightly in an expression that merged utter surprise with sleepy confusion. Jack feigned ignorance and shrugged.

"Have you even read the Odyssey?" Jack continued to stare innocently at Daniel. Daniel ran a hand through his hair and opened and closed his mouth for a minute, mumbling to himself. Jack smirked.

The tent flaps rustled again, this time producing Teal'c, staff weapon in hand. He looked from Jack's smirk to Daniel's flustered muttering and back again before raising an eyebrow.

"Daniel Jackson, are you allergic to the bite of the mosquitoes of this planet?" Daniel's confused expression turned to Teal'c just as his hand, which had been aiming for his hair, brushed against the giant swelling on his forehead. He frowned.

"Oh… damn it. Jack, you could have said something." Daniel rummaged through the pockets of his pack, presumably for the first aid kit and the antihistamine ointment.

"I did." If Jack could have bottled the expression Daniel sent him, he was sure it would have been a hundred times more potent than whatever biochemical weapon they were sent here to research. Daniel had found some reference in some rock some other team had brought back, or so Jack had paid attention enough to understand during the briefing. So far, they'd only found a lot of rain and millions of mosquitoes.

"Major Carter has not yet awoken, O'Neill. She appears unwell." Jack grabbed the first aid kit from Daniel's hands and ducked through the flaps of the tent before Daniel had a second to protest.

Teal'c's assessment was spot on. In the dimmer light of the tent, Carter looked rough. Despite the fact that she was covered in a thick layer sweat, she was curled into a ball, shivering. Her pallor made the red bumps of the mosquito bites stand out like bright polka dots. Ignoring the creak of his joints, he knelt next to her and shook her shoulder gently.

"Carter, hey, Carter, rise and shine." She didn't respond. Frowning, he removed the thermometer strip from the first aid kit and held it against her forehead. She moaned slightly and mumbled incoherently which was at least some sort of response, though the 103.4 that the thermometer read back to him quickly dashed any reassurance the response inspired.

"Carter, I know you feel like crap. I need you to wake up and talk, though. Come on, Carter." He shook her shoulder with slightly more force, earning a more earnest moan as Daniel and Teal'c entered the tent behind him.

"She's at 103.4. Start packing up camp. We need to get her back to Fraiser. She's not waking up." The silent tension of the three men as they quickly deconstructed the tent around Sam and rolled away all their belongings replaced the earlier teasing commentary. The walk to the gate took most of the day and carried on in stressed wordlessness. Before they spoke again, Sam was safely secured on a stretcher on her way to the infirmary.

"What happened, Colonel?" Jack echoed Daniel's hair combing and shook his head at Hammond's worried face.

"She was fine the night before, General. She took first watch, then Daniel, then Teal'c, and then me… Last I saw, she was fine." General Hammond nodded and surveyed the rest of SG1, doing a similar double take at Daniel's forehead, but saying nothing.

"Report to the infirmary and get yourselves checked. Debrief at 0700." Jack followed Daniel and Teal'c to the infirmary by way of the showers. The fact that their post-mission physicals were quick and done by some other random medic he'd missed the name of had the worry already gnawing a hole in the lining of his stomach ratcheting up a notch. He was glad the debriefing was as quick as could be, though the scene he found when he eventually did make his way to the part of the infirmary where they'd placed Carter did nothing to quell his queasy anxiety.

She was in the isolation room. All the medical staff entering and exiting her room were wearing full protective precautions, yellow paper gowns, blue gloves, and facemasks obscuring their identity. If it hadn't been for the heels, the height, and the hair, he wouldn't have recognized Fraiser until after she'd unwrapped herself. She stopped him in the hall with a hand on his shoulder and the sorrowful expression in her eyes nearly made him throw up. He'd seen that face on too many people before. It never meant good news.

"I'm not going to lie to you, Colonel. This isn't good." Jack swallowed forcefully and tried to control his racing heart.

"It's pretty serious. She's got a very high fever right now and is showing signs of organ damage. I'm on my way to debrief the general, but I want you to be prepared going in there. We've got her sedated and intubated to help her body heal and to do some of the work for her so her body can rest. She's on hemodialysis to take the work from her kidneys, which are starting to shut down, and a cooling blanket to try and get her temperature under control. You're welcome to go in and sit with her…" Jack wasn't sure he heard all the words Janet was saying. Her mouth was still moving, but the words "serious" and "organ damage" kept swirling around in his head.

He felt her squeeze his shoulder and move off in the opposite direction of the isolation room. Jack found his feet propelling him down the corridor to where a cart of gowns, gloves, and masks sat by the isolation room door. He fumbled his way into the crinkly yellow paper snuggie and associated paraphernalia, wincing at the snapping sound of the gloves and wrinkling his nose against the heat of his own breath under the mask.

One look and he was glad Fraiser had taken the time to try and talk to him. The Carter that he saw in the isolation room bed looked nothing like the one he'd come to know over the years. An opaque white tube emerged from her mouth, held in place by thick pieces of tape. Just thinking of the way the tube extended down her throat nearly made Jack gag. Her eyes were closed and the rest of her body was shrouded beneath a puffy blanket which vibrated with the hum of an air compressor. Wires stretched up from beneath the blanket to monitors flickering with numbers he didn't understand. Most distressing of all, thick tubes extended out from the blanket, carrying a dark red substance he realized must be her blood to a machine that looked like a fridge mixed with a tape cassette and back again. The only thing he could place was the IV pole, it's bag, and it's cord, the end of which disappeared beneath the vibrating pillow blanket.

Ignoring the fear that wrapped itself tightly around the anxiety pounding his pulse in his gut, Jack dragged the lone stool quietly over to the head of her bed and made himself at home, staring at her face and the way the tube slithered down her throat like a plastic snake. This wasn't the Carter he knew. This Carter was too quiet.

He was sure that medical people must have moved around him doing medical things and time had definitely passed the next time he was actively aware of his surroundings. The hands on the clock on the wall looked a good few hours ahead of where they'd been the first time he'd looked. Carter looked exactly the same.

"Jack?" Daniel's voice behind him made him realize what had drawn him out of whatever hole he'd disappeared into. He turned, looking up from Carter's nearly lifeless face.

"Hey." Daniel was holding two coffees. The big welt of a mosquito bite was still standing out on his forehead like a mountain on Mount Rushmore, but it was no longer funny.

"I saw Janet in the hall. She said things are hopeful." Jack took the coffee Daniel handed him and stared into the hole on the plastic lid.

"She says it's most likely an alien form of a virus similar to malaria, based on her fever, her blood results, and all the mosquito bites." He heard Daniel drag a stool over next to his and continued to stare at the hole. How could something smaller that that pinprick be causing this?

"The good news is that her fever is coming down and the hemodialysis is helping. Whatever they saw that told them that her kidneys were failing is less or something, to be honest, I'm not sure, but…" He trailed off, gesturing at the equipment and Carter.

"She was fine when I took over the watch, Jack, I swear. She said she was tired, but she looked fine. If I… I swear if I had any idea that she was sick, that she would be like this, I would have…" Jack looked up from the coffee cup lid. If they'd still been on the planet, he would have blamed the congested sound of Daniel's voice on his allergies, but the desperate look on his face and the fact that his voice cracked before he trailed off belayed more emotion than histamines. Jack rested his hand on Daniel's shoulder and spaced out on the endlessly pumping flow of Carter's blood through the hemodialysis machine.

It was late at night or early the next morning before there was any change. Jack wasn't sure of the time. Daniel had fallen asleep against him at the bedside and Teal'c stood watch at Carter's feet. There'd been a constant flow of yellow papered, mask wearing medical staff throughout the long hours and it wasn't until Janet's voice spoke from one of them that he realized she was in the room. She still had that confounding look in her eyes. Jack bit the inside of his cheek.

"I'm going to recommend that the three of you step out for a moment. Go get some sleep and some food or a shower. We're going to trial her off of hemodialysis and, if her kidneys are ready, try to get her off supports. It'll take a while. You can come back this afternoon." The afternoon felt like forever away, but Jack was too tired to argue. He wiggled his shoulder to wake Daniel and followed Teal'c from the room.

Full of the heaviness of sleep and worry, his feet found their own way and he found himself standing not in front of his quarters, but in front of Carter's lab. The door was mercifully unlocked. He let himself in and sat heavily in the chair behind her desk, folding his arms over her keyboard and letting sleep take him.

"Jack? Are you awake?" Daniel's voice woke him what felt like hours later. It took an alarming amount of time for him to place where he was and why and, when reality rushed back to him, it felt like a staff blast to the gut. He stood so fast he got tunnel vision.

"Woah. Easy, Jack, she's fine." He focused on Daniel, shaking what sleep remained from his head and stepped around her desk.

"Fine?" Daniel smiled and held out one of the two coffees in his hands. Jack took one and swirled a swallow around his mouth. Déjà vu.

"Janet said her kidney's are doing fine and she's breathing on her own. They've extubated her and are weaning her off sedatives. She should be awake soon." Jack was sidestepping Daniel and back in the infirmary before he could say another word.

She looked still, but way less critical. Gone were the numerous tubes, the plastic snake in her throat, and the pillow blanket. Nothing but monitor wires and an IV emerged from beneath a humble infirmary blanket that rose and fell with each of Carter's breaths.

He pulled the stool back up at her bedside, locating her hand. He was so busy examining the way the blue lines of her veins traced over the substructure of the back of her hand that he missed the first flickering signs of her awakening.

"Sir?" The word was hushed, hoarse, and the most wonderful thing he'd heard in weeks. He looked up. Her eyes were open, blinking slowly, and she was looking at him expectantly.

"Hey, there." She smiled. He grinned back.

"How're you feeling?" Her eyes fell to half-mast and she swallowed with a grimace.

"A bit rough, but I've been worse." Jack gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. She squeezed back. He felt relief wash over him like a hot shower after a monsoon and the terror that he been strangling his gut start to unclench.

"That you have, Carter, that you have. Get some rest." She smiled, closing her eyes. He fought the urge to smooth the hair stuck to her face back against the pillow.

"Thank you, sir." He thought about replying, about questioning why she was thanking him, but it was clear that she had fallen back to sleep. Casting a look around to see if the little green light was lit on the security camera or if anyone else was watching, he ran a hand through her hair and freed it from where it had become matted against her cheek.

This could be a problem, he realized, reflecting back on the course of the last forty-eight hours and cataloguing how professional and regulated his emotional response had been, but for now, it seemed, everything had turned out okay. The alien jungle fever was on its way out and, save for perhaps Daniel, no one else knew he had spent the night in her lab or the way every muscle in his body had knotted themselves into a Gordian knot until the moment she was back on solid ground. She was his second in command. Caring about what happened to her was a natural part of leading the team. He'd do it for any of them. No one was going down on his watch and he'd stick out vigil for another night if necessary.

He waited till Carter was deeply asleep before reorganizing himself on the stool so that the grating shift didn't disturb her. It wasn't long before Daniel joined him, reprising the slump he'd fallen into earlier and Teal'c took up his post at the end of the bed. It was a strange relationship they had, the four of them, but he wouldn't trade it for the world.


	11. K is for Kidney Stone

K is for Kidney Stone

He'd been bored out of his skull, sitting on a stump between Daniel, who was in full diplomatic mode, and Teal'c, who he was pretty sure was kel'no'reeming, when he'd been hit from behind by a sensation of pain so strong and sudden that, for a second, he thought he'd been shot in the back. Then, before he had any chance to remove himself to a less public location more appropriate for such things, his stomach had evicted its contents. It had put a surprisingly quick end to the negotiations. Shuffling along next to Daniel, Jack filed the procedure away for future emergencies. When you can't stand the meeting anymore, throw up.

"How're you doing?" Jack leveled a glare at Daniel. The man looked as if he expected a change in his answer to the question he'd already asked at least ten times in the past ten minutes on the walk to the gate.

"Peachy. Stop asking." The initial cataclysm of pain had faded and been replaced by a dull ache that waxed and waned in uncomfortable waves from just below the back of his ribs, around his right side, and down into his groin. On the positive side of things, the nausea had thankfully abated and the glimmer of the event horizon ahead felt particularly sweet.

Hammond met them at the bottom of the gate ramp and, with one look at the still vomit-speckled spay on Jack's boots, had ordered him to the infirmary. Jack was happy to oblige. Janet and her needles never looked so good.

He took off his boots and lay down on a bed without any objections or snide remarks, an action that drew the quick attention of the doc. Her heels clicked his way before he had time to make a crease in his pillow and the curtain was pulled around his bed before he could blink twice.

"Colonel, what's going on?" He opened his mouth to explain, but quickly clamped it tightly, an abrupt flaring of pain and nausea overriding any form of verbal communication. Janet caught on and he found an emesis basin waiting in his lap. He closed his eyes and groaned.

"I can tell you're not feeling well. Can you tell me when this started?" Jack felt her hand on his wrist, fingertips taking his pulse.

"Just now… half hour ago, maybe." The fingers left his wrist and the back of her hand rested against his forehead.

"And what are you feeling exactly? Besides the nausea." The hand left his forehead and he could hear her fiddling with things to his right.

"Pain… right side…" He swallowed any further description, tasting bile. He shifted uncomfortably in the bed, the pain pulsating up and down his right side growing in intensity. He opened his eyes and focused on the emesis basin, unsure if he was going to throw up or pass out. Janet continued.

"How much pain, on a scale of 1 to 10?" His stomach won out. Jack felt Janet's hand on his shoulder as he heaved. As embarrassing as he found it to have an audience, it was oddly comforting.

"7…It's a 7, sometimes less, sometimes more," he mumbled, panting. Janet was frowning on his periphery.

"When you can, I need you to lie back, sir." He leaned back slowly against the bed with a groan and felt the emesis basin removed from his lap. He closed his eyes and set his jaw.

"I'm going to lift up your shirt, sir. You're going to feel my hands touching your stomach. I need you to tell me if that makes the pain better or worse." Jack nodded. Janet's hands were cold. She started in the upper middle of his stomach and gently pushed down, moving over and down his left side and then over to his right. He shifted in the bed. The cold touch wasn't making anything better or worse, just uncomfortable. Janet's hands rested and then pressed deeply on his lower right side, going below the lip of his waistband. After what felt to Jack like an awkward expanse of time, she removed her hands. He could feel her staring at his face. He opened his eyes.

"Well, I don't think it's your appendix. I'm going to draw some labs and place an IV so we can get you some anti-emetics going. I'm also going to do an ultrasound just to be sure. I'll be right back." Nodding, Jack threw one arm over his face and curled up onto his right side.

He had just gotten to the good part of the Simpsons episode he was reenacting in his head to dull the pain when he felt a blood pressure cuff strapped on his arm and a thermometer shoved into his mouth. As soon as his vitals were taken, the tourniquet was on his arm and the nameless nurse he had yet to identify was swabbing the inside of his elbow, jamming in his IV, and drawing blood.

"Hey!" he growled, close to swatting at her before she set the dressing in place, hooked up the line, and skedaddled. He narrowed a glare at her instead, hoping to catch a glimpse of her nameplate so as to avoid her in all future endeavors.

"Jack?" Daniel's voice and the hand and head that followed, peeping around the curtain distracted him from gathering the data. He sighed and turned the glare in Daniel's direction instead.

"What?" Nodding as if he expected this type of response, Daniel stepped inside the curtain and made himself comfortable in one of the yellow plastic chairs.

"How's it going? How're you feeling?" Jack glared at Daniel and said nothing. Daniel nodded and crossed his arms, blinking back undeterred by what would have withered a new recruit.

"That good, huh?" Any response was derailed by a reappearance of Janet. She fussed around with the IV, pushed in a syringe of what Jack hoped was the magical not-puking medicine, and then noticed Daniel at the bedside.

"Daniel, did I say he was ready for visitors?" Daniel's patient expression turned sheepish and he shook his head. Jack marveled at the diminutive doc. Despite her size and kindly nature, she could break the strongest of men.

"You can wait in the hallway like anyone else. Go. Thank you." With a wave, Daniel scuttled back out of the curtain. If the pain in his back and side hadn't happened to flare at that exact second, he would have laughed.

He heard wheels rolling on the floor to his left and uncurled. Janet was standing with what looked like a laptop with a long cord and a probe of some sort. He frowned.

"This is an ultrasound, sir. I'm going to use it to look at your appendix and the surrounding area to see if that gives us some answers to what's causing all this. Can you unbuckle your pants, please?" If he'd felt in better spirits, he would have made a comment about having her buy him dinner first, but the anti-emetics hadn't kicked in and he didn't trust himself to open his mouth.

Jack undid his belt buckle and shifted his pants down his hips a bit as Janet squeezed jelly colder than her hands onto the probe and then slid it back and forth on his belly, looking at the laptop screen. The jelly squelched and glooped. The sound and feeling triggered a memory of the last time his belly was full of similar goop, though that time it was inside instead of outside and at the mercy of Hathor. The memory sent his stomach into hysterics and he barely managed a strangled "doc!" before he was knocking her hand and her probe off of him and grabbing for the basin.

"Well, the good news is that your appendix looks fine. The bad news is, and I'm going to wait till the blood results are back to confirm, but I'm thinking you probably have a kidney stone." Jack groaned and waited for her to continue.

"I've got pain meds and anti-emetics going so those should start to kick in soon. If you start to have to pee, sir, let me know." Janet waited till he sat back from the basin to hand him a cloth to wipe away the ultrasound goo.

"Uh, why?" Ultrasound goo removed, Jack re-buckled his pants and curled back up.

"If this is a kidney stone, urination will be a key part of its removal." Jack didn't like the way that sounded, but the sound of ringing klaxons and a call for a medical team took precedence over further discussion and Janet took off out the door of the infirmary.

It was a while before Janet returned to his bedside. He could hear hustle and bustle and groaning beyond his curtain barricade, so he figured whatever was going down was more urgent than whatever was happening with him. The meds flowing into his IV had long ago dulled the pain and nausea and, if it were not for one nagging sensation, he would probably have drifted off to sleep, but there was one issue – he had to pee.

It had gotten to the point where he couldn't really ignore the call of his bladder any longer. Uncoiling himself and dragging along his IV pole, Jack wheeled along to the infirmary bathroom. Nothing could have prepared him for the mind-numbing pain of following through with his body's commands. It felt as if fire, jagged ice crystals, and white hot lightening was trying to come out of him instead of just urine. Breathing raggedly and his hands shaking slightly, he finished up, washed his hands, and rolled slowly back to bed.

Janet found him shortly thereafter. Whether by the pained creases of his face or the extra ashen level of pallor, she quickly put two and two together.

"I'm guessing you had to pee, sir?" Jack nodded slightly.

"On a scale of 1 to 10…" Jack shook his head.

"You're going to need a bigger scale than that, doc." Wincing sympathetically, she nodded and pat him on the shoulder.

"Your blood results came back with a higher level of uric acid. That and what's going on clinically confirm that you have a kidney stone or stones. I would have had you give a urine sample, but my guess is that you'll be peeing again soon." Jack groaned. Janet pat him on the shoulder.

"This is probably going to take a while. Based on the level of uric acid, I'm guessing it isn't too big of a stone. I'll have a better idea of the size with an x-ray. Chances are, sir, that, if this isn't too large, you're probably better off passing the stone at home." Jack frowned.

"Doc, when you say pass…" Janet smiled in a way that was more of a grimace.

"The stone will come out from your urethra, sir. You'll pee it out." Jack opened and closed his mouth, unsure how to even reply to that. Janet just nodded.

He was rolling his IV pole back from x-ray when he discovered his bed was occupied or, rather, surrounded. Daniel and Teal'c were taking up space in the uncomfortable yellow chairs. Teal'c appeared to have returned to the state of kel'no'reem Jack had interrupted earlier and Daniel had his nose buried in a tome of some sort, feet up on Jack's bed. Jack wheeled over and returned to his residence, shoving the offending feet back onto the floor with his own.

"Hey!" Daniel's startled exclamation was halfway between a greeting and a defense at the removal of his feet. Teal'c opened his eyes.

"Hey yourself." Jack grimaced at a flare in his back and curled up, his back to Daniel and Teal'c.

"Janet stopped by and filled us in. That really sucks." Jack harrumphed a response, drawing the covers as high as they would go.

"Sam figured that, given what was going on, it was probably best for her to focus on getting work done in her lab, but Teal'c and I can keep you company." Jack shifted lower so that the sheet went up to his ears.

"Do you wish to be alone, O'Neill?" Jack rolled over.

"As much as I would love an audience as I pee out a rock…" Jack waved a hand as if the phrase would complete itself. Teal'c nodded, stood, bowed, and departed. Daniel stood to follow, and turned back at the curtain.

"I get it. If I were, well… We're here if you need us and if you decide to go home and, well, you know, uh… We can hang out in the other room and… watch hockey or the Simpsons or whatever. Just let us know…" he trailed out the door. Jack smiled. If Daniel were willing to watch hockey and the Simpsons, he must really be feeling sympathetic.

Janet's reappearance stifled the thought train of more things he might be able to get Daniel to do out of sympathy for his current plight. She had the grimace-smile back in place.

"Well, colonel, it's a small stone. Chances are that you'll pass it completely within the next twenty-four hours if you continue to drink fluids. If you're amenable, I'm going to suggest that you do so in the privacy and comfort of your own home. Here, it's, well… you're better off in your own bathroom, sir." Listening to the continued scuffling behind his curtain, Jack nodded.

"It will hurt to pee until it passes. I'd love for you to try to catch the stone if at all possible so that we can send it for analysis, but I understand that it may not be the most feasible task. I'm going to send you home with a specimen container for that purpose." Janet set the clear plastic cylinder on the bed. Jack fiddled with it.

"You may see a bit of blood. A little bit is nothing to worry about, but if it's more than that, call me and come back as soon as possible. I'm going to send you home with anti-emetics and pain relievers. You can come back at any time, you can call me at any time, but I sincerely think you'll be more comfortable in this process somewhere more private." Blushing a bit, Jack stared at the specimen container in his hands and nodded.

He found paperwork in his lap next and, as soon as he'd signed his name enough times, found his coat on and was following an SF to a waiting car and riding home. He barely made it into his house before he was once again running for the john.

In between painful interludes in the head, he'd put on a game of hockey on the television. The sound of other people hitting things and one another was a pleasant distraction. He was grateful that something had prompted him to buy a 24 pack of water bottles. He kept a couple of them in each room, pausing to drink between pacing to and from the toilet. Walking helped somehow, when he wasn't bent over in pain.

He had thought that perhaps he'd already passed it and just hadn't noticed when the final battle began. He'd been sitting on the couch, spacing out at what must have been the third hockey game he'd watched that evening when pain similar to the first jolt back on the planet struck. Breathless, dizzy, and nauseous, he'd stumbled back to the bathroom and made friends with the tile floor, upchucking most of the water he'd downed.

Lonesome misery joined pain and nausea as he struggled up to his feet, returning to the earlier task of urinating. It hurt so much worse than before and for a moment, he wasn't sure if he was going to black out. As the tunnel vision closed in, he looked down into the toilet bowl. The water, which had alternated various shades of yellow all evening, was tinged with red. It wasn't red enough to call Fraiser, he figured, but red enough to fill him with a primal level of fear and anxiety. He wished he wasn't alone.

Then again, who would he want with him here as he peed blood and rocks. Daniel? The man was an expert on rocks, after all. Jack figured he'd probably be freaking out just as bad if not worse at the sight of bloody pee. If Daniel were here with him, he'd probably be trying to manhandle him into the car to get him back to the infirmary, inevitably explaining the cultural significance of kidney stones or what was the appropriate ritual somewhere for when someone peed blood. It was probably best that he wasn't there. Especially since, if he were here with Jack in the bathroom, he would be seeing Jack with his pants down. Somehow, that just didn't seem right.

Of the three people on his team, Jack rambled as he struggled to stay upright, Teal'c was the one person he wouldn't be embarrassed to be doing all this in front of, somehow. Teal'c would stand next to him, keeping him upright, and looking anywhere and everywhere but at what Jack didn't want him to see and when everything was over, he was sure Teal'c would never mention any of it again. He might file it away in the impressively large Jaffa rolodex in his head, but he would know better than to bring it up in conversation.

As Jack thought of Teal'c and wondered if Jaffa ever got kidney stones, the pain escalated to the point that Jack was sure either this thing was about to come out of him or he was about start singing soprano from here on out. He fumbled with the specimen container, unscrewing the lid and sliding it into the range of fire just in time to hear a euphoric ping as a tiny hard crystal of a thing hit against the plastic.

And that was that, Jack guessed, holding the container up to the light. It really was tiny. Almost too small to believe that it was the cause of the day's and the night's events. Shaking his head, he screwed on the lid, washed his hands, and shuffled back out of the bathroom.

He made it all the way to his foyer when his front door opened and a familiar, bespectacled face peeked in.

"Jack?" The face called out, stepping the rest of the way through the door to reveal Daniel and, behind him, Teal'c. Jack paused in his trek back to the couch.

"Daniel?" Daniel smiled, seeming relieved to see Jack up and around and not, perhaps, passed out in a puddle of bloody urine.

"How're you feeling?" Daniel eyed the specimen container in Jack's hand. He slid it behind his back.

"Fine. Things are… passed." Daniel's smile grew and a similar look of mirth was echoed on Teal'c's face.

"That is most fortunate." Jack nodded and gestured in the direction of the couch, passing through the kitchen to put the specimen container in the fridge. Daniel and Teal'c followed.

"We brought your truck back." He'd just sat down when Daniel made the announcement and he almost bolted back upright to check his garage.

"Relax. It's fine. I drove it and Teal'c drove my car." For the second time in twenty-four hours, Jack found himself speechless.

"Teal'c, drove? You drove, T? A car?" Teal'c nodded.

"Indeed, O'Neill, they are not as difficult as a tel'tac. Daniel Jackson had more difficulty with your vehicle than I with his. The act of shifting gears is more difficult than in one that does so automatically." Jack sent Daniel a look. Daniel raised his hands.

"Your truck is fine. He's joking. It's a joke." Jack looked back and forth between them. Teal'c's features were indiscernible.

"My truck better be fine, Daniel, or you're the one who's going to be peeing pretty next time." Daniel snickered. Jack rolled his eyes at the two of them.

"And, Daniel, next time the two of you decide to go joyriding, let Teal'c take my car. He's driven more types of vehicles than you and I put together. He can handle a stick shift." Jack wasn't sure if Daniel had actually muttered a euphemism about Jack's stick shift under his breath or not, but he glared at him, returning his attention back to the hockey game.

"What was that saying? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will come back to haunt you next time we're sharing a tent off world?" Jack cast a glance at Daniel and Teal'c out of the corner of his eye. Between the three of them, he wasn't sure who was grinning bigger. Probably Teal'c, Jack figured, he had a bigger mouth.

"Hey, Teal'c, do Jaffa get kidney stones? Never mind." The hockey game was suddenly less and less exciting. Jack found himself nodding off and felt a blanket spread over him. When the universe conspired to have him peeing rocks, Jack supposed that, while perhaps he was better off going through with the actual process in privacy, a little brotherly companionship was a heck of a lot better than solitude.


	12. L is for Laryngitis

L is for Laryngitis

It had started earlier that week with what felt like his usual seasonal allergies. Given the time of year, he hadn't thought much of the congestion, sneezing, and tickle in his throat given how red and watery his eyes were. He'd taken some antihistamines, passed the medical exam with flying colors, and traipsed off to whatever planet they'd ended up on. At this point, he was too tired to remember the alphanumeric designation.

They'd made it through the gate just fine, but trouble in the form of a Jaffa patrol found them shortly thereafter. In the ensuing firefight, Daniel had somehow managed to get separated off from the three of them, captured, and thrown in some filthy dungeon cell that was doing wonders for his allergies or whatever all this was. The lack of ornate gold façade made it clear that the dungeon was not of Goa'uld construction. For the first time in his life, he found himself wishing he were prisoner in a ha'tak or at least somewhere cleaner and warmer. A Goa'uld holding cell wouldn't be nearly half as damp or covered in black mold, festering hay, and who knew what else.

They hadn't tried to interrogate him. For that at least, Daniel was thankful. They seemed not to know who he was or to recognize him as part of SG1, content to let him rot in the cell. Daniel certainly felt rotten.

What he had thought had been allergies had morphed into something more sinister, that or he was also terribly allergic to the cell. He couldn't tell and he really didn't care. His sinuses pounded, his eyes swum, the tickle in his throat had morphed into a deep, rattling cough that rubbed his parched throat as dry as sandpaper. Swallowing hurt. He was pretty sure that if the Jaffa holding him caught on and tried to interrogate him, they'd be out of luck. There was little chance he had any voice at this point. He couldn't tell if he had a fever given how cold it was in the dungeon. To top it all off, it wasn't like he had anything to help with any of the above, so he alternated between curling up feeling sorry for himself and investigating some way out.

He'd ruled out the main door. Thick padlocks held it shut tightly. There was a small, iron barred window up at the very top of the wall, but it was far out of his reach, too small for him to fit through, and the walls were covered in a layer of thick, black mold that both made them slippery and made Daniel wonder how much worse he'd be feeling if he was clawing up through it, breathing in airborne spores. He'd found one possible alternative, a manhole cover sized drain in the floor that had been covered in the indescribably filthy hay. Kicking the hay away from the drain had unleashed a coughing fit so hard it sent floaters dancing through his field of vision and nearly had him on his knees. He was kneeling by the grate, trying to determine how it was held in place in the dim lighting of the cell when he heard the voices.

"Are you sure it's this way?"

"To be completely honest, no, sir, I'm not. Daniel would be the one to know about ancient sewer system design, but he's not really here to ask right now."

"Yeah. It's too bad we can't ask Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello, or Raphael. They'd know, too."

"I am most astonished, O'Neill. I did not believe you had been listening to Daniel Jackson's lectures on the history of Taur'i art."

"They're Ninja Turtles, Teal'c. He's making a joke."

"The turtles of Earth train to become ninja warriors?"

The voices of his teammates rose louder as they grew closer to the grate. Daniel tried to speak and announce his presence above them, but screaming as loudly as he could produced no more than the faintest whisper. Frustrated and exhausted, he kicked angrily at the grate, surprised by the resounding clang.

"Did you hear that? Hold up."

The sound of sloshing feet and their accompanying voices stopped abruptly. Daniel kicked at the grate again, this time pounding out a careful SOS.

"Daniel?"

Daniel repeated the SOS.

"That's got to be him, sir."

"I am not certain. It may be a ruse used to entice and trap us."

Halfway through repeating the SOS kick for a third time, a chorus of sneezes caught him off guard. He heard a laugh from below.

"That's definitely him. Hang on, Danny-boy, we're coming for you."

The sloshing sound renewed more vigorously accompanied now by muffled grunts and indecipherable exclamations. Daniel stepped back from the grate, unsure of what was about to come up from the sewer. Moments later, the grate shook and rose a bit out of its plating. Daniel reached down, squeezing his fingers around the heavy grate and helping to shift it to the side.

He peered down into the dark sewer and grinned. Teal'c stood up to his waist in the dank water below. On his shoulders sat Jack who had his legs wrapped tightly around Teal'c's upper body. Jack's arms were holding fast to Sam's feet, which were perched on his own shoulders, forming a three-person tower. Sam grinned back at him, fingertips still gripping the base of the plating that had held the heavy grate in place.

"Come on in, Daniel, the water's fine!" Daniel shook his head in disbelief, wondering where they'd learned that particular trick or whether he'd reached the point of hallucination, and waited till Sam and Jack had climbed down and the three of them had moved a safe enough distance back before lowering himself into the sewers, dragging the grate back into place above him as he went with a satisfying thud.

He dropped the distance down into the startlingly cold water, slipping a bit and going fully under. He was thankful for his congestion, blocked as his nose was from inhaling the disgusting sewage, and for the strong arms, which lugged him, sputtering and coughing, to his feet.

"Easy, there, keep at least one lung, would you?" Daniel smiled weakly, glad that Jack had yet to let go. The tunnel was spinning. He leaned more heavily on Jack and closed his eyes, catching his breath.

"You okay? You look like crap and not just because we're in the sewers." Daniel felt Jack's wet hand against his forehead and tried not to think about what it was wet with.

"Talk to me here, Danny-boy." Daniel opened his eyes to meet Jack's worried ones.

"I feel like shit," he tried, half expecting no sound to come out and surprising himself and Jack when the sound that came out of his mouth sounded nothing like him and 100% like a Goa'uld.

Jack jumped back from the half-embrace, raising his zat. Daniel slipped and struggled to stay upright on the slick sewage. Carter and Teal'c followed Jack's example, surrounding him with raised weaponry. Daniel raised his hands in a gesture of peace, his attempt to explain caught in a fit of coughing.

"I don't feel anything, sir. I think he's just Daniel." He heard sloshing approach cautiously from behind as he fought to stay upright.

"I also do not detect the presence of a symbiote." Cough quieted, Daniel straightened, keeping his hands raised. Jack was eyeing him cautiously.

"Do what you've got to do, just please can we go home?" he rasped. He felt Sam come up behind him and investigate the back of his neck.

"There's no sign of trauma and I'm still not getting anything." She gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze.

"Can you open your mouth, Daniel?" Daniel nodded, opened his mouth, and closed his eyes against the bright light of Sam's flashlight.

"It looks pretty red, but given everything that's not surprising. I'm no medical doctor, sir, but it doesn't look like there's a point of entry anywhere." Daniel opened his eyes again and shivered.

"I also do not believe Daniel Jackson has become a host. However, he does appear most unwell." Daniel felt Teal'c wade up behind him to his left, close enough that their bodies were slightly touching and he leaned against him, grateful for the support.

Jack drew closer, squinted a bit and seemed satisfied, though he kept his zat primed.

"Think you can walk out of here? It's a ways." Daniel nodded.

Jack hadn't been exaggerating. The maze of sewage-filled tunnels wrapped back and forth for what felt like miles. Sam took the lead, pinpointing small markers she had left as they entered like breadcrumbs. They continued through the near darkness in silence, Jack casting glances back at him that transitioned from suspicious to concerned as the time passed and, Daniel assumed, Jack accepted that he really had not become some sort of host. Every so often, they'd get close to a grate, its presence signaled by a tiny shift in the light and the sound of Jaffa murmuring above. It didn't seem as if they were particularly upset and Daniel concluded that they hadn't discovered he'd escaped yet.

After what felt like many hours of sewer diving, the tunnels opened into a wide, filthy lake ringed in trees. They waded out onto the shore in the cover of darkness and crept the short distance back to the gate. Before he had taken two steps down the ramp, he found himself surrounded by a biohazard team, escorted to decontamination, and then to the infirmary.

Janet had taken one look at him and assigned him a bed. She'd run him through the usual tests, including an MRI, and proved conclusively that he was Goa'uld-free, but perfectly miserable. Despite the nasal and throat swab, the bright flash of the penlight, and the repeated cold stethoscope, Daniel was beyond thankful to be curled beneath the warm blankets and was fast asleep before he could attempt any sort of voice-less conversation.

He'd slept a few short hours in the infirmary before an arm had shaken him awake. He'd come face to face with the night nursing staff who'd informed him that there'd been some sort of situation and he needed to relocate to his on base quarters. Having dragged himself from the infirmary bed to that bed, Daniel had gone back to sleep without question, tossing and turning for the rest of the night.

He woke an indiscernible amount of time later, trapped in a twist of sweat-drenched blankets, to the sound of raised voices outside his door.

"What do you mean he's being summoned to the briefing room? He's my patient. It's bad enough he got bumped from the infirmary. There is no way I'm clearing him for anything other than rest right now."

He blinked blearily and cast a hand around for his glasses, finding them and checking the time – 0700.

"The Tok'ra can kiss my ass, colonel."

The door rattled with a knock and then swung in to reveal the petite doctor and Jack. Daniel drew the twist of covers higher and sat up. Whatever had brought the two of them here must have been somewhat urgent, Daniel concluded – Jack hadn't yet changed into his uniform.

"Morning, Daniel. How are you feeling?" Daniel swallowed experimentally. Despite the glass shards in his throat, he had to admit that he felt marginally better. Drained, exhausted, sore, and somewhat out of it, yes, but he was considerably less congested and his head was not, in fact, pounding.

He opened his mouth to communicate as much, but, no matter how many times he cleared his throat, not even the earlier Goa'uld sound came out. Janet looked sympathetic, but behind her, leaning against the door, Jack was smirking.

"You can't talk at all right now, can you? Oh, this is going to be interesting - a linguist with laryngitis." Daniel shot him a glare that did nothing to diminish the smirk. Janet rolled her eyes at the two of them.

"Other than your throat, is anything else bothering you?" Daniel shook his head and acquiesced to Janet's inspection of his throat with a penlight, her check of his pulse, and a thermometer under his tongue.

"Very well, colonel, given that he's already been essentially discharged from the infirmary and given that this seems to be viral and improving on its own, I will allow you to enlist his help with whatever is going on. However," Janet paused, shifting her gaze from Jack to Daniel, "if you start feeling worse in any way, you are to come back to the infirmary. No going off world. No overexertion. You should be resting and drinking fluids as much as possible. You are NOT cleared for active duty, do I make myself clear?"

Daniel and Jack both nodded.

"And none of you should be leaving the planet. You're still confined here for the next forty-eight hours until cleared after swimming through alien waste. Understood?" Daniel and Jack nodded again and, shaking her head in a mixture of amusement and exasperation, Janet left.

Jack waited till Janet was out of earshot before pestering him.

"You really can't talk at all?" Daniel glared at him, extracted himself from his twist of blankets, and stumbled over to his closet for a clean uniform.

Jack crossed his arms and watched as Daniel fumbled through the closet. He didn't look as awful as he had the day before and definitely not as awful as he'd seen Daniel look when ill, but the man was clearly under the weather. He was never the fastest at gathering items and changing gears, especially first thing in the morning, but the man didn't usually lean as heavily into the door jamb or breathe like finding a clean uniform was the equivalent of running a marathon. Jack frowned.

"So the Tok'ra are here and they're asking for your help by name, but you can say no. Or, well, you can shake your head and I can go tell them you're not up for playing with the snake heads today." From his vantage point halfway in the closet, Daniel glared back at him until he got the message to turn around. Jack stayed facing the door until the rustling sound of Daniel getting dressed stopped, replaced by a dry cough.

He turned back to find Daniel sitting on the edge of his bed, looking worn out, but slightly more put together, though the way he gripped the edge of the mattress as if the room was a tilt-a-whirl had him looking like he was feeling considerably worse than he had when Fraiser had been in the room. Perhaps this was a bad idea…

Instinct kicked in before his brain and Jack found himself kneeling in front of Daniel with a hand on Daniel's forehead. The way his eyes closed and he leaned slightly into the cool of Jack's palm had him flashing back too many years ago to similar predicaments with a sick Charlie. He had to hold himself back from running a reassuring hand through Daniel's hair and tucking him back into bed before calling the principal's office and marking him absent.

"Should I go get Fraiser and tell the Tok'ra you're staying home from school today?" A smile flickered on Daniel's face and he shook his head, mouthing words.

"Yeah, I didn't get that. You got paper somewhere?" He followed Daniel's pointed finger to a desk in the corner with a legal pad and pen, surrendering them to Daniel's outstretched hand.

Moments later, he held the paper up with the question, "why are they here?" written hastily across. Jack shrugged.

"No idea. Hammond called me and told me to gather the troops. Carter's on her way and Teal'c is around here somewhere. I haven't seen them yet and Hammond was short on details, just that the four of us were needed." Daniel nodded and drew his arms around himself in a hug. Jack's frown deepened. Either the man was cold, trying to physically keep himself together, or both and none of those options were a good sign.

"You don't have to be up for this. I can tell the Tok'ra you'll see them next time or bring anything urgent to you so you can work on it from here… You really look like shit." Daniel smirked and mouthed "thanks" followed by something else that Jack couldn't decipher. Following his confused expression, Daniel wrote "I'll go to the meeting. If I feel any worse, I'll go to the infirmary. I just need coffee." Jack smiled.

"How about this, then, huh? I'm going to run and change. Then, I'll grab us both some coffee, meet you back here, and we'll see what the snake heads have dragged in. You rest for a bit. I'll be back by 0745. Okay?" Jack waited until Daniel, nodding in confirmation, curled back up on the bed before leaving for the locker room.

Jack had hoped Daniel would have looked at least slightly improved with the slower, assisted start, but the man shuffling next to him, sipping at commissary coffee, looked like he was barely putting one foot in front of the other and, behind his glasses, his eyes had the pinched look they always got with a particularly bad headache. Jack made a note to cut the meeting as short as possible and keep Daniel as much out of the line of action as was feasible.

Hammond was standing action-ready at the head of the briefing room table when they made it up the stairs. A flicker of concern passed over his face in Daniel's direction and, had the meeting not started at that very moment, Jack was sure that Hammond would have ordered Daniel back to the infirmary. Concern reflected from Carter and Teal'c as well and Jack was glad to note that Jacob was the Tok'ra operative at the helm. Jacob, at least, was human enough to pick up on the way Daniel folded himself into his chair and curled around his coffee cup. Jack wasn't certain, but the looks Jacob was sending to their end of the table looked more fatherly than military.

"Thank you all for coming. George tells me you've only just got back, but we need your help. We have a bit of a situation." Jack did his best to pay attention to Jacob's spiel, but he found himself divided between the details of what seemed like very boring galactic politics and the need to monitor the man next to him who was coughing more than Jack liked. Just when he'd been about to halt the meeting and send Daniel to the infirmary, Jacob called on him.

"…and that's where you come in, Daniel." Daniel raised his head from where it had sat in his hands, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose in a valiant attempt to curb his pounding headache. He'd removed his glasses a while ago and had been tuning out the blur that was Jacob, focusing instead on riding out the meeting and making it back to bed. He felt infinitely worse than he had when he woke up that morning. Every swallow felt like fire in his throat and coughing felt like a staff weapon blast. Jacob was continuing. Daniel put his glasses back on and tried to pay attention.

"The operative managed to smuggle out the plans to Heru'ur's new fortress, but they're in code. Our best Tok'ra couldn't crack it. I'm hoping that, with your combined experience and Daniel's linguistic skills, you can do what we could not and, when you've decoded the data, that we can share the knowledge it contains. The Tok'ra high council believes that the infiltration and destruction of this base will be a big step in the right direction to curb Heru'ur's forces and, in doing so, disrupt the power dynamic of the system lords." Jacob was holding out some sort of gou'ald device from which a hologram of what Daniel assumed was Heru'ur's new base flickered brightly. Letters and numbers jumbled through the image, flashing what could be labels and information. Daniel ran a hand through his hair and sighed. That was going to be hard to crack.

"The new base is on the planet Hun'ak. When this has been cracked and the necessary data retrieved, we'll join forces and take it down." Jacob was looking at the four of them, as was Hammond, though their expressions were considerably different. Jacob's eyes held a certain weary hunger. Hammond's just looked concerned… or maybe, Daniel admitted, he just wanted Hammond to be concerned so he could crawl his way back to bed and pretend he hadn't just been handed an overwhelming cryptographic project that he had no hope of completing when he felt his horrid.

He was vaguely aware that Jack was talking. Jacob handed the hologram device to Sam and it became clear that the meeting was adjourned. He blinked slowly and felt a hand on his shoulder.

"Come along, son." It was Hammond. Everyone else was suddenly standing on the opposite end of the room, bent over the device. As he wondered if the blink had maybe been more of a nap, Daniel realized Hammond had apparently switched roles with Jack.

"Can you make it to the infirmary under your own power?" Daniel nodded and stood, trying not to hold too embarrassingly tightly to the table. The room was moving too fast. He felt a strong grip on his elbow.

"Take your time, son, we'll go together." He was never quite sure what to make of General Hammond. When he'd first met him, Daniel had been a bit afraid of the man, or rather intimidated. He wasn't sure if he'd mellowed over the years or if since that very first meeting, he'd just let his guard down and grown from a military hard ass to one of the many Daniel not only considered a friend, but someone he'd trust with his life. As he leaned against the cool wall of the elevator, coughing so hard his eyes ran with tears, and felt a hand on his arm helping him stay upright, Daniel realized that, while Jack, Sam, and Teal'c were the three people he trusted most in the world, there were a few others he could count on to get his ass where it need to be, which was, in this case, the infirmary.

"Doctor Fraiser?" He was vaguely aware of Hammond talking with Janet, but more concerned with responding to the gravitational pull of an infirmary bed. He walked out of his shoes and rolled under the covers, succumbing to sleep.

"Daniel?" Janet was shaking his shoulder. At least, he assumed so. It was her voice that was talking.

"I know you're exhausted, but I need you to wake up just for a little bit. Come on. That's it. Let me see those blues." He cracked open his eyes. She was hovering over him, stethoscope in hand. He squirmed deeper into the bed, away from the cold, hard disc.

"Hey, there. I know you're not feeling great. Your fever's up and I'm worried about pneumonia. Can I take a listen before we get a quick chest x-ray?" Daniel closed his eyes again and dragged a hand across his face, realizing in doing so both that someone had removed his glasses and that he'd slept through getting an IV.

The cold hard disc seemed like ice against his chest and he gasped, triggering a slew of coughing. He felt Janet's hands on his shoulders helping him sit up as he coughed, grimacing at the surge of pain from his throat and the ache in his diaphragm from the repetitive action.

"That's it, Daniel, just breathe." His hands were shaking. He hid them in his hair and lowered his arms to his knees, holding his pounding head. The stethoscope moved around his back. The infirmary felt cold and even his skin felt uncomfortable.

"Okay, you can lie down if you want. I'm going to send for a chest x-ray to rule out pneumonia." Daniel nodded, falling back into bed and pulling the covers back up, shivering. At least this was warmer than that cell he'd been in…

From the hard infirmary chair, Jack glanced over at the x-ray film Janet was holding up to a light box. She was discussing it in muted tones with someone he assumed was a nurse. The ghostly image of what looked like ribs meant nothing to him, but, based on the fact that Daniel was still out cold and looked paler than the white sheets he was curled up in, it probably meant they weren't going to get this whole Heru'ur base Tok'ra thing solved any time soon.

"How's he doing, doc?" Janet was back at Daniel's bedside, looking at the numbers on the monitor and fussing with his IV pump.

"The x-ray looks like this is probably viral bronchitis and not pneumonia… which is good news," she explained at Jack's blank look. He nodded.

"What's the plan?" Daniel was shifting in his sleep. Jack pulled the blanket up higher over his shoulder and he quieted.

"Rest, fluids, and supportive care are all we can do for a virus. He should start to improve in the next few days. What did the Tok'ra want earlier?" Jack watched as Janet checked Daniel's pulse against what the monitor was showing and then smoothed a wrinkle in his sheets.

"Oh just some base thing. Carter's working on transcribing the hologram or whatever. Teal'c is helping. Jacob brought the thing here with the idea that Daniel would crack the code and we'd blow it up, but it might just come to blowing it up without cracking everything." He shrugged and stared at the still sleeping Daniel. Janet nodded and put her hand on his shoulder.

"Give him another 24 hours. I can't promise he'll be up and cracking, but he'll be a bit more like himself. Let him rest and do what you've got to do. Come back in the morning." Jack nodded and followed Janet out.

The doc was right, Jack concluded, as she usually was. He'd gotten waylaid by other responsibilities – a training talk to recruits, a team leader meeting, and a stack of paperwork – and, by the time he made it to the infirmary to check on Daniel, it was already close to noon. He looked light years better than the day before and was sitting up in bed, sifting through a pile of paper with Carter, and scribbling in a notebook.

"Hey there, kids. What's up?" Carter flashed him a smile and Daniel looked up briefly, clearly distracted by the papers full of images from the hologram.

"We're working on the map of Heru'ur's base. Based on the specifications, Daniel and I think we've almost got it cracked." Jack raised an eyebrow and looked at Daniel. Daniel opened his mouth as if to speak, but only got as far as the faintest of a whisper before his body had other ideas and a coughing fit took over.

"Still trying to get rid of the lungs, I see. How's that going?" Daniel kept coughing and rolled his eyes.

"Janet's put the kibosh on any off world travel for the next two weeks as far as Daniel's concerned, sir, but she think's he'll at least be able to go home tomorrow." The expression on Daniel's face made it clear exactly what he thought about that decision and it wasn't happiness. Jack dragged a chair over and looked down at the spread of papers.

"Alright, well, what've we got on the intel?" Daniel opened his mouth to try to talk again, but the act of attempted speech triggered another coughing fit. Jack pat him on the back.

"Let's have Carter do the talking on this one, eh? Something tells me you might be better off writing for a bit." Daniel rolled his eyes again and cast around through the pile of paper on his bed for his notebook as Carter explained.

"Well, sir, based on other gou'ald constructions, we can assume certain elements are present and use those elements to crack the code. For example, this here is obviously a ring platform and this space is clearly a glider bay. Daniel is using the gou'ald words for those locations to decrypt the code and translate the rest of the data about the structure." Jack looked back at Daniel. The man had obviously become distracted in the search for the notebook and was now writing something Jack couldn't decode on the edge of one of the pages. He looked slightly frenzied and feverish, but more like himself.

"Ah. Gotcha. Sounds exciting." Carter flashed him a grin and turned back to the pages at Daniel's feet. Jack watched them for a moment, heads bent together over the pages, riffling through them with pens in hand before deciding he was probably better off annoying Teal'c as he gave sparing lessons to the new recruits.

It seemed the predictive power was strong with each of them. Not only did sitting in the audience in the gym watching the recruits take on Teal'c and making quiet, untraceable fart noises whenever Teal'c squatted prove to make a supremely entertaining use of his afternoon, but Daniel and Carter were successful in breaking the code and Daniel was indeed discharged in time for Jack to give him a ride home. The fortuitous series of events timed so perfectly that Jack, waiting on a bench in the locker room for Daniel to change into his street clothes was even present to witness one of the new recruits shyly presenting a very puzzled Teal'c with a bottle of Beano. It took all of his special ops training not to break into raucous laughter.

He was still struggling not to laugh as he walked with Daniel up to the surface and drove him home. As the miles rolled on through dusk, Jack gazed over at the man nodding off in his copilot seat. It was unnerving to be around a quiet Daniel. Sure, he still made attempts to communicate. It wasn't as if he were totally silent and stone faced, but not hearing him ramble endlessly about who knew what was disquieting.

He made a command decision and took the exit for his house instead of Daniel's apartment. There was plenty of extra pajamas, etc and he was pretty sure Daniel had left a toothbrush in the guest bathroom at some point. He'd gone grocery shopping earlier in the week and had enough to share. It didn't make sense to kick the sick man out of his car to convalesce alone.

When they pulled up into Jack's driveway, Daniel didn't even look surprised. Part of Jack wondered if he even noticed. Jack let Daniel do his own thing and, by the time he'd collected the mail, dragged the garbage to the curb, and changed into his own end of the day attire, Daniel was passed out in the guest bed. Jack followed suit.

The morning came early. Hammond and Jacob had planned a final briefing for 0600 with a departure at 0630 to rendezvous with a Tok'ra operative in possession of a tel-tak. They'd then fly said tel-tak to Hun'ak, plant the C4 in the most strategically powerful spots, detonate, and get out of there. Jack replayed the plan in his head as he sipped his coffee, staring at the dawn cresting over the treetops in his backyard. He thought of waking Daniel, but, as he was supposed to be resting and recovering, thought better of it. Swinging his keys around his finger, he sent the sleeping Daniel a wave and headed off for the SGC.

Daniel awoke much later. The sun had risen and the heat of the sunbeams through the window of the guest room was making him feel uncomfortably warm and more feverish than before. Dragging the comforter with him lest the change in temperatures between the rooms make him even more miserable, Daniel relocated to the couch. He flicked through the channels on the TV, found nothing interesting, and was dozing on the brink of fully falling back to sleep when a radically different sensation surrounded him along with a large temperature differential.

Opening his eyes, Daniel suddenly found himself lying not as he had been on Jack's lumpy couch, but rather on the floor of what he guessed was an Asgard ship, wrapped as he was in his blanket. Extremely perplexed and more than somewhat embarrassed to suddenly be wherever he was in a borrowed pair of Jack's sweatpants and an old t-shirt, Daniel wrapped the comforter more tightly around himself and stood, walking barefoot around what he thought might be the bridge, searching for whoever brought him there in the hopes that they would return him back.

"Greetings, Daniel Jackson. I am most sorry for the interruption. I was attempting to summon O'Neill." The gray alien appeared through the door and marched around the edge of the room over to the control crystals. Daniel opened his mouth to explain, his earlier predicament making itself known as no voice followed through on the talking command and his body chose instead to substitute a coughing fit. The Asgard looked up at him in a way that was at once scientific and sympathetic. He looked kind of like Thor. Was this one Thor?

"You are ill. I will return you immediately…" A loud keening noise Daniel assumed was some sort of alarm interrupted the Asgard and, mumbling something Daniel didn't quiet catch, he or she scurried from the room.

Just as the alarm silenced and he was beginning to hope he was about to be beamed back down to Jack's couch, he felt the ship move and then, with a simultaneous sinking realization, felt the jolt in the pit of his stomach that only accompanied a jump to hyperspace. Gazing out the window at the streak of stars, Daniel slumped down in the corner of the Asgard ship, drawing his blanket around himself and coming to the awful conclusion that he was suddenly, without his consent, and without a voice on a mission with the Asgard and that as long as the rest of his team was offworld, no one was even going to know he was gone or go looking for him. Closing his eyes, he folded his arms on his knees and drifted off to sleep, too tired and sick to put up any sort of a fuss.

Gating to the rendezvous, picking up the tel-tac, and flying over to Hun'ak or whatever it was called had been a piece of cake. Hun'ak, however, was decidedly less appetizing. They'd orbited the planet a few times before Jacob had located the most defensible position closest to the base and ringed them in. That was when the fun began.

While it was true that the base itself looked, at least from a distance, just like the specifications the Tok'ra intel had provided, what hadn't been part of the description was the surrounding area. Jack bit his lip and muttered about his level of hatred for incomplete intel and Tok'ra surprises. Civilians in the form of merchants, tradesman, farmers, women, and children filled the area. Coming out from behind a sand dune to find the base and the surrounding civilization supporting its construction had instantly and intensely reminded Jack of Abydos. For the first time since they'd left, he was both very glad Daniel wasn't along to put up a fight about the humanitarian impact of the mission and wished that at least Daniel's linguistic abilities were with them. With one look at her, he could tell Carter was thinking the same thing.

"Sir? How are we going to get all these people away from the base without raising suspicion?" He sent her a look. A pained scowl flashed briefly before military stoicism set in.

"We don't really have a choice here, Carter, the few for the many. We stick with the plan." Yeah, it was better Daniel wasn't there and this was definitely part of the whole shebang he'd be leaving out of the report. Drawing the ridiculous robe he'd been given lower over his face, Jack gave the signal and the three of them crept out, mingling with the locals.

Daniel woke with a lurch as the ship decelerated from hyperspace. Spinning below the window to his left was a planet he did not recognize, but then again, he hadn't seen that many planets from this altitude and, with the ones he had, he wasn't certain he remembered enough to reliably identify more than two or three, one of them being Earth. His head hurt too much to think clearly, anyway.

The whoosh of the panels announced that the nameless Asgard was returning through the door.

"There was no time to wait for O'Neill. It is you who must act instead." Daniel closed his eyes and sighed. So much for a sick day…

"We orbit the Asgard protected planet Hunash. The gou'ald Heru'ur has violated the protective treaty and begun building a base in this system on this planet." Daniel opened his eyes and blinked, rubbing his glasses against the shirt hem. There was no way. Hunash was a similar word to Hun'ak, but that just wouldn't be…

"A gou'ald tel'tak has just entered this system. It is cloaked. It beamed three lifesigns down onto the surface who we believe may be instrumental in the last phase of the base's completion. This ship is not equipped to disable the base. You must infiltrate the base's forces, obtain information on the ship's design, and bring the information back so that its weaknesses can be identified and it can be destroyed." Daniel opened and closed his mouth, letting out a silent groan of frustration. Now would be a really good time for his voice to come back.

The Asgard was moving the stones around on the controls. Daniel tried hand signals to no avail. Apparently, gesticulations, even very large, easily interpreted ones, were not a thing that crossed the Asgard linguistic and cultural barrier, at least as far as this particular Asgard was concerned. Daniel arrived at the conclusion that this guy was definitely not Thor and probably had some sort of intellectual defect. Anyone else would have at least tried to pick up a human healthy enough to follow through with the mission at hand, let alone tried to figure out why said ill human was now waving his arms and stomping his feet to get their attention. As his gesticulations changed to ones that involved one particular finger, the air around him started to buzz and he found himself relocated down on the surface of the planet.

Miraculously, they'd managed to blend in seamlessly. The maelstrom of the hustle and bustle of workers around the base site lent itself easily to infiltration. Based on what Teal'c translated of the surrounding gou'ald, the base was maybe a day away from completion. A fleet of Jaffa and, as was rumored, Heru'ur himself, were anticipated to arrive the next morning for the unveiling of the new structure. Bopping from one herd of workers to the next, it took maybe an hour or so to plant enough C4 to blow the whole thing sky high.

Jack had taken a quiet moment in a deserted storage cabinet to inform Jacob about the gou'ald's anticipated arrival, advocating to wait out the night on the planet and blow the C4 the next morning when it could do the most damage, possibly even taking out Heru'ur. He'd been holding onto a giddy wave of anticipation at the thought of leveling another gou'ald, letting it wash away the guilt of possible civilian casualties when an all too familiar noise echoed from an air vent.

Securing his Tok'ra communication device in his pocket in exchange for his zat and flashlight, he followed what sounded like, but couldn't possibly be, the sound of coughing to the vent on the far wall. Crouching next to the grate, he primed his zat and kicked the grate off, pointing the light and the zat into the opening. The face cringing behind raised hands was absolutely not what he expected to see.

"DANIEL?! What the HELL are you doing here?" He slid his zat back in his holster and reached roughly into the air vent, dragging the man out by what may have been his hair or perhaps a handful what he slowly realized was the comforter from his guest bedroom. Coughing and spluttering, Daniel regained his footing in the storage closet and shook free of Jack's grasp, looking sheepish.

"I don't even know where to start with you. What the hell is going on?" Daniel mouthed something at him. Jack frowned. Of course in all the moments where he really needed an explanation, Daniel didn't have a voice.

"Try again?" Daniel swallowed, cleared his throat, and appeared to be yelling, but really only emitted a whisper of a sound. Jack struggled to make it out.

"Did you say Asgard?" Coughing again, Daniel nodded.

"The Asgard brought you here? In my pajamas?" Blushing and wrapping the comforter more tightly around himself like a strange puffy cloak, Daniel nodded. Jack ran a hand through his hair and tried to ascertain the reason there would suddenly be Asgard involvement.

"Seriously, we're talking Thor here?" Daniel shook his head and rolled his eyes. He cleared his throat and tried to talk again to no avail. Jack offered him his canteen.

"No. A stupid one… he was looking for you, got me instead." The voice was barely more than a whisper, but it was audible. Jack shook his head and drummed his fingers against his thigh in thought, motioning for Daniel to keep the canteen.

"Okay, but why? Is this a protected planet?" Daniel nodded. Jack let out a low breath.

"Alright. Fine. That doesn't really affect us, then. We can still blow it up and make Heru'ur's day. Might affect the arrival tomorrow, though… Is whatever Asgard idiot who sent you here still up in orbit?" Daniel made a disgusted face and nodded. Jack continued thinking out loud.

"Okay. Might be a good way to get all the people out of the line of fire. Big ship?" Daniel raised an eyebrow and nodded again.

"People?" he rasped. Jack kicked himself.

"Been outside yet?" Daniel shook his head. Jack winced. This wasn't going to be pretty.

"Yeah. There are people, lots of them. Why don't we have a look-see." Switching off his flashlight and changing it for his weapon, he made for the door. Daniel made a slightly more audible squeak noise and tugged on Jack's shirt sleeve, coughing. Jack turned around.

"What?" Still coughing, he made a sweeping gesture at himself and then finger guns. Jack rolled his eyes. If anyone had told him that morning that this mission was going to devolve to playing a bizarre version of charades in a gou'ald closet, he would have played hooky and stayed home with the sick man, at least then they'd be playing this game out of harm's way.

"The gray assed idiot didn't even arm you?" Un-holstering the zat, he handed it to Daniel and, thinking again, freed a few zip ties and his hunting knife from his pocket. Between the two of them, they managed to make the comforter into a less conspicuous outfit choice that blended in more smoothly with the fashion of Hun'ak.

"Better?" Grinning at the pile of feathers on the floor, Daniel nodded. Jack rolled his eyes, hoping no jaffa came in later and suspected an invasion of geese.

"Good. You owe me a comforter. Let's go." Switching to hand signals, he peered out of the doorway and, finding the coast clear, snuck down the hallway to where he'd agreed to meet Carter and Teal'c, Daniel on his six.

Carter and Teal'c were crouched behind the pile of foundation stones, watching the action of the camp at a safe distance. The sun was starting to set and, with it, the level of action of the camp. People were milling about more slowly, settling around campfires and tents. Jack knelt next to them. Wheezing slightly, Daniel more collapsed than sat next to him. Jack smirked at the look on Carter and Teal'c's faces.

"Surprise! The Asgard figured we could use a hand. If the C4 doesn't blow, we can just give them all Daniel's virus." Daniel gave a silent wave. Smiling and shaking his head at the continued speechlessness of Carter and Teal'c, Jack filled them in on the change of circumstances.

"Sir, can we trust this Asgard ship to remain cloaked? Do we know that Heru'ur won't be scared off by an Asgard presence and, even if it stays cloaked, how are we going to communicate with this Asgard to get all these people aboard while we blow the base?" Daniel winced. Trust Carter to find the possible loopholes in the plan.

"Indeed, O'Neill. We have no way to communicate with the Asgard. Though perhaps, it is best that Daniel Jackson is here. We may be able to create a diversion while you and Major Carter destroy the base." Jack surveyed the three of them. Daniel looked pale, exhausted, and slightly feverish, but like the day's adrenaline had accelerated the healing process and he was ready to take part. Carter, seeming to jump to Teal'c's conclusion, looked hopeful and Teal'c had the smug look he got whenever he knew his idea was best. Jack nodded.

"Alright, I'll bite, T. What's your plan?" They stayed hunched behind the pile of stones until darkness fell completely and then, in the obscurity of torchlight, staked a claim in a deserted tent to spend the night.

Jack woke before the dawn and sat at the tent entrance, watching the camp come to life. Teal'c had long ago snuck out in search of a worthy disguise for the two of them. He reappeared now from the edge of the tent city, a bundle in his arms.

"What'cha got, T?" Teal'c spread the spoils on the tent floor. Armor worthy of a first prime and a gold threaded cloak spilled out from the bundle.

"Nice!" Teal'c smiled and bowed his head.

"These were meant to be gifts for Heru'ur and his companions upon his arrival. Those guarding them have found themselves otherwise occupied and should be led to believe that the gifts have been taken for offering." Jack clapped Teal'c on the back and nodded in approval.

From where she sat riffling through supplies, Carter flashed an approving grin. Daniel, wrapped around a steaming mug of milky tea he'd somehow managed to snag from a neighboring campfire, nodded as well.

"Did someone fill in Jacob?" The hairs on the back of Jack's neck went up and his fingers itched for a trigger at the sound of Daniel's current voice. He was back to the low bass, multi-toned sound of a gou'ald.

"Ack! No talking for you, but yes, he's aware." Smirking, Daniel sipped at the tea and investigated the robe.

"I believe it will fit, Daniel Jackson." Nodding at Teal'c, Daniel placed down the mug and wriggled into the ornate cloth. Jack had to admit that he looked the part.

"And we're certain that Heru'ur hasn't been here yet? No one will know what he actually looks like?" Carter shrugged, checking for the last time that all was secured.

"We cannot be certain, Major Carter. However, as I was procuring these supplies, I overheard discussion of jaffa placing bets on Heru'ur's appearance." Jack smiled. Daniel raised an eyebrow.

"What were they guessing?" Teal'c grinned.

"You will make some jaffa quite pleased this morning, Daniel Jackson." Carter let out a laugh. Daniel crossed his arms and made a face like he wasn't sure if he was being made fun of.

"Uh… Why?" Jack winced and glared at him.

"Less talking, more walking. Time to get a move on, people. The sun's rising." SG1 was in position by the time the pink glow of dawn replaced the early morning's dark blue.

Crouching in yesterday's stone pile, Jack held out his Tok'ra communication device and watched people scurrying among the tents. Cloaked, Jacob had ringed Teal'c and Daniel out of the tent and down over on the far side of the settlement, a safe distance from the rigged explosion. As Daniel and Teal'c put on their show, Jack and Carter were set to detonate the C4. Jacob was meant to keep an eye on the situation above between the Asgard and whatever ha'tak Heru'ur decided to ride up in.

Surveying the gathering crowd, Daniel cleared his throat and swallowed nervously. His throat hurt less than the day before, but a lot was riding on his voice holding out in imitation gou'ald tones and the thought of forcing the growing crowd of people into false submission and fear put a bad taste in his mouth and a gnawing ache in his chest that had nothing to do with his current state of health.

Stomping back and forth in front of the crowd with the hood of his armor raised and his staff weapon primed, Teal'c certainly looked the part. Donning his most haughty expression, Daniel gazed at the sea of people. There had to be at least a thousand of them. The camp must have emptied.

"The almighty Heru'ur graces you with his presence. Bow before your god!" Teal'c apparently had arrived at the same conclusion about the success of their diversion and sought to begin. The sea of people fell to their knees. Daniel rose to his feet.

"Has the base been completed as I commanded?" An older man who must have been in charge rose on quaking legs and fell prostrate at his feet. Daniel fought the urge to help him back up again.

"It has, my lord, as you have commanded." Teal'c nudged the man with the butt end of his staff weapon.

"My lord Heru'ur did not command you to speak, old man." Daniel held up his hand. Teal'c stepped aside.

"What of the weapons within? Speak." Daniel listened as the older man rambled, fighting the urge to cough and hoping that Jack and Sam blew the C4 soon before he blew their cover.

"The Asgard vessel isn't cloaked, Jack." Jacob's voice crackled in over the Tok'ra communication device. Jack sent a hopeful grin to Carter, her finger poised on the detonator.

"Any sign of Heru'ur?" The line was silent a moment.

"No… Wait, yes! A Ha'tak just jumped out of hyperspace. I'm picking up on their transmission. Hold on…" Jack held his finger up, ready to give the signal.

"The Asgard is citing the treaty and raising weapons. The Ha'tak is, too. They're going to battle it out… No, wait, go! They're ringing down into the base. Go, go, go, go, go!" He gave the signal. Carter pressed the detonator and, just as the lavender sheen of a ring transmission sliced the space above the base, the structure engulfed in a giant ball of fire.

"Get us out of here, Jacob!" Identical rings centered around him and Carter and, in the blink of an eye, they were back on the tel'tac.

"Get Daniel and Teal'c. Let's get out of here!" He called, sliding into the copilot seat next to Jacob as they zoomed to the other side of the encampment.

Daniel was desperately hoping that Teal'c had picked up on the telepathic panicked signal he was trying to send. Not only was he pretty sure that his last "kree" had used up what little imitation gou'ald voice he had left, but he was also very sure that he could no longer fight the urge to cough. Clamping his mouth shut and breathing shallowly through his congested nostrils, he felt his diaphragm spasm and his face grow red, hoping he was giving off an impression of anger and not constipation.

"Your god grows angry at your disobedience!" Teal'c was storming back and forth between the crowd. Daniel focused on the base in the distance. Suddenly, a beam shot down from above and the base erupted into a fireball.

The crowd erupted similarly into mass hysteria. Daniel dropped the act, sucking in air and giving in to the coughing fit. Teal'c stopped pacing, standing close enough for the fall of rings just in time for them to appear around the pair of them. Daniel was never more thankful to see the inside of a tel'tac.

As the sound of coughing filled the hold and they made the jump back to hyperspace, Jack let out the breath he'd been holding.

"Well, that was a close one. Next time, the Asgard better mind their own little gray butts." Jacob smirked and bowed his head, Selmak taking over.

"Their involvement was most advantageous, in fact. With the Asgard presence, it is unlikely Heru'ur will attempt to build a second base in this star system." Shrugging agreement, Jack made his way back to the hold to check on the rest of his team.

Daniel had striped off the gou'ald attire, returning to the base layer of Jack's pajamas. Teal'c had done similarly with the armor. The three of them sat against the back of the hold, Teal'c cross-legged between the two of them. Still coughing and snuffling quietly, Daniel looked most of the way asleep, head drooping lower and lower till it just about rested on Teal'c's shoulder. Teal'c didn't seem to mind. From somewhere in the pockets of her uniform, Carter had produced a deck of cards and, from Jack's perspective in the doorway, looked to be teaching Teal'c the game of poker.

"Deal me in." He slid down next to Carter and accepted his hand. He never quite knew what to expect, he reflected, especially going on missions with the Tok'ra, but even with ridiculous surprises from allies and teammates alike, they'd yet to be dealt something they couldn't wrangle. Staring at his hand, he reconsidered. Maybe this time, he'd let Teal'c win.


	13. M is for Migraine

M is for Migraine

He'd been getting migraines since he was about twelve and he thought he knew all his triggers and warning signs quite well by this point. By always drinking coffee, avoiding certain foods, and staying on top of them when they did start, Daniel had so far avoided being sidelined by a migraine before or during a mission. The aura was always the biggest tip off. Lights would be brighter, sounds louder, smells stronger, and tastes more foul than normal. Then, usually about half an hour before anything else started, he'd see a few shiny floaters pass through his range of vision like bits of silver tinsel escaping from a Christmas tree. If he took medication right at that point, he'd get away with an awful, pounding headache, but be able to carry on. If he missed the mark, he'd be faced with absolutely excruciating pain, sending him to curl up in the nearest, darkest, quietest location to wait out his misery alone.

They'd been grounded earth-side about two days ago for a rigorous few days of training. The first two days had been long hours of lectures mixed with exhausting exercises in hand to hand, marksmanship, and tests of physical strength. Every muscle and joint in his body was sore and, given the mountain of translations he knew were backing up on his desk, the whole experience so far had been a complete and utter waste of his time. The first two days of training were designed as a preparation for the final day's simulation of an alien incursion in which SG1 was to face off with a group of twenty marines Daniel swore had to be part giant given their sheer size and amount of muscle. To say he was not looking forward to the simulation would have been a huge understatement. Wednesday morning found him shuffling into the SGC, sore and grouchy.

Moping through the pre-simulation breakfast briefing, he'd missed the first warning signs. He'd put the undrinkable soap taste of the coffee, over-bright flair of the PowerPoint presentation, heinous BO of the marine sitting next to him, and the grating drone of the speaker up to how horrendous the three days of training had been rather than an impending migraine. It wasn't until after they'd been handed their weapons with intars set to maximum and placed in their spaces for the beginning of the simulation that he realized what was going on.

He was crouching next to Jack in the corridor, trying to focus on his face as the klaxons blared and team after team sprinted past to face the team of "alien" marines when Jack's face and everything else he could see was suddenly covered in the most brilliant silver fireworks.

"Damn it, Daniel, are you even listening?" He blinked forcefully. It took a second or two for them to fizzle out into oblivion and his vision to return. He found the insane amount of floaters a bit jarring. If a usual migraine resulted in a handful, what sort of behemoth produced that many?

"We're going to get creamed out there in a moment if you don't pull yourself together." Jack didn't look too happy and, given Sam and Teal'c's expressions, Daniel was torn between bailing and feeling like he was letting his team down. He fingered the pockets of his pants with the sinking realization that part of this simulation was a test of a new, lighter uniform for off-world travel and that both his meds and his backup meds were in his locker a dozen stories up.

Jack had to admit that Daniel looked like crap. He knew the younger man had been overworking himself lately given the amount of mornings he had come in to find Daniel's name still on the signed in list instead of the signed out list at the check in. He had hoped that a few days off from archeologist/translator duty would do the man good, even if it meant sitting around in boring lectures and sweating up a storm refreshing physical skills. Now, looking at the guy, he doubted his earlier assumption. Daniel was deathly pale and the bags under his eyes highlighted their neon blue in a way that made his face skull-like and almost painful to look at. He'd kept an eye on him during the briefing. Now, as he had then, he looked entirely unfocused and possibly unwell. He paused in repeating the spiel they'd learned that morning and the plan for their response. Carter and Teal'c were clearly already aware and ready to go. Daniel, on the other hand, looked about ready to fall over.

"Damn it, Daniel, are you even listening? We're going to get creamed out there in a moment if you don't pull yourself together." Jack slightly regretted his harshness in calling Daniel out given that he somehow grew more pale and blinked as if seeing a ghost, rubbing his hands on the pockets of his pants. He was weighing the pros and cons about sending Daniel to the infirmary and testing through a man short or pushing him on and testing through without a fully functioning fourth member when the klaxons roared again and their time was up.

"Teal'c, take point. Carter, cover our six. Daniel, are you in this?" Daniel squinted and nodded, standing with the full support of the wall. Jack sighed and shook his head.

"You're with me, then. Let's go."

Daniel was thankful that the first portion of the simulation was in a section of the SGC where the power had been cut. After the florescent brightness of the corridor and the wailing of the klaxons, the eerie green glow of the silent corridor beyond the blast door was welcome. He followed Teal'c quietly down the hallway, focusing on staying upright and ignoring the sweeping dizziness and stray bits of silver tinsel gliding through his field of vision every so often. The intar-P90 felt impossibly heavy in his hands, but he tried to hold it steady. It was too late to back down now.

As they rounded the corner, a stray floater on his left drew his attention just before a marine popped out from behind a pillar. Daniel jumped, pulling the trigger and sending the intar directly at the marine who fell back was a loud thunk. The first tendrils of pain curled themselves around his left temple.

"Nice one, Daniel." He felt Jack's hand pat his shoulder with a force that threatened to knock him over and cause him to drop his weapon. He swayed, stumbled, and nearly fell, Jack's hand suddenly turning from a pat into a hold and drag, pushing him up against the wall and then pulling him back around the corner into a more defensible position. The pain building in his left temple chose that moment to explode like the earlier fireworks and he sank to the floor, curled up in a ball with his head in his hands, left hand pressing against the pressure point in the left orbital of his skull.

"Alright, what the hell is going on?" Jack had seen Daniel in all manner of ill, injured, and indisposed states. The sudden near-collapse and the fact that he was now holding his face as if his eye was popping out was unnerving.

"Daniel?" Daniel swallowed against a wave of nausea before attempting to reply. There was no mistaking it. This one was going to be a really bad one.

"Migraine. Really bad. Really sudden. Sorry." Jack swore under his breath. He knew how Daniel's migraines went. One long, bad weekend at his cabin had provided an in-depth picture. Jack's urge to chew Daniel out for not stepping out of the simulation when he undoubtedly knew what was happening and was now charging up the clock on their time was overrun by how miserable he looked.

"Sir, the infirmary is two floors down. Daniel, can you manage to get there yourself?" Jack had to hand it to Carter for the quick problem solving, but Daniel wasn't answering and his breathing was too fast for Jack's liking.

"Can you stand?" Daniel nodded, releasing the grip on his face and stumbling up, swaying slightly and gripping the wall.

"Can you make it to the infirmary on your own?" Daniel nodded and sighed. Carter squeezed his shoulder reassuringly.

"Alright, that's your new mission, then. Carter, Teal'c, we head for the gate room as planned. Let's go." Jack bit back the twinge of guilt as he watched Daniel shuffle over to the escape hatch, pop it open, and crawl inside.

If the emergency-light green of the corridor had been dark, the inside of the escape hatch was pitch black. If he hadn't had to hold onto the ladder, the total lack of light, sound, or smell in the escape hatch would have been heavenly, but, as he grasped the tiny metal rungs with shaking hands and tried not to fall or puke, he found himself feeling lost and utterly disoriented. He knew he had to go down to get to the infirmary, but how many rungs there were to a floor and how many he had to go to get to the infirmary were snippets of information completely inaccessible to his pounding head.

They made it through the second pop-up unscathed, taking down five marines waiting to ambush them for a total of six out of twenty. There were still multiple floors of dark winding corridors to go before the gate room. Jack found himself sending guilty looks at each escape hatch they passed wondering if Daniel had found his way to the infirmary or was lying somewhere in need of help.

He got about sixty rungs down before he had to stop. The pain in his head was too fierce to keep counting and the ice pick stabbing itself into his left eye was inspiring a breathless, dizzy nausea that made all movement intolerable. As silently as he could, he felt behind him for an exit door, fingers finding the lip of one a few more rungs beneath him. Slowly and quietly, he made his way out, back into the green darkness, and curled up on the floor. He couldn't remember ever feeling this awful.

Lying on the cool concrete, he felt the footsteps before he heard them. He fingered his P90 and waited for the crew to come into range. Twelve of the marines appeared around the corner, completely oblivious to his position.

"This is SG1's round, right?" The biggest of the crew was whispering with the one in the front.

"Yeah. Those assholes always win these things. Let's mix things up a bit and give them a run for their money." Daniel could see the white of the marine's teeth grinning in the green glow. Silently, he uncurled himself into a crouch.

"Yeah! We're supposed to split up and take the gate room, but I bet if we stay together, we'll take them out. Four against twelve sounds fair." Daniel swallowed rising bile and wished he'd had someone else join him in the escape hatch. The marines were getting closer. He put his finger on the trigger.

Jack could hear the marines ahead of them and signaled to Teal'c and Carter. Peering around the corner, it looked like the final twelve of them shuffling together. A few hand signals later, Teal'c was on the other side of the hallway and he and Carter were ready for action.

The chaos that ensued was nothing that he had anticipated. Intars were flying all around and everyone was yelling. Jack managed to work his way around the corner to a new position, taking out two of them. Teal'c joined him, bringing down another three. Carter snipped two from her first position before entering into hand to hand. He found himself in a hand to hand skirmish and was about to shout congratulations to Teal'c for the intars he saw taking down the remaining two marines when he caught a glimpse of Teal'c also throwing punches in the dark. It was only when the blows stopped flying and the last three marines were properly restrained that he saw a familiar shape huddled on the floor by the escape hatch.

"Daniel?" The shape didn't move, but it let out a low moan. Jack secured the zip tie around the marine's wrist, sent a message over his radio to notify Hammond that they'd completed the challenge, and climbed around the simulated carnage to where the moan had originated.

"I thought I told you to get to the infirmary." Even in the security lighting, Daniel looked rough. Jack knelt in front of him avoiding what looked like a puddle of sick.

"You want an escort?" Daniel's grasp on his proffered hand was worrisomely weak, but Jack hauled him to his feet. Carter appeared on his other side, Teal'c at the lead. The walk to the infirmary was slow and Jack was thankful when the bright white glow appeared on the horizon. Daniel, however, grimaced and squinted like a vampire meeting the sunlight.

"Teal'c, run ahead and shut that light off, will you? And let Fraiser know we're coming so she has the good stuff ready." By the time they crossed the threshold to the infirmary, the lights were off and Daniel's usual bed was waiting.

Curling up in a ball on the less than comfortable infirmary bed and waiting for the prick of an IV in his arm, Daniel thought back to the other migraines he'd suffered through in his life. The first few adolescent ones in foster homes and school nurse's offices hadn't been a picnic, nor had the many he'd sweat through in dorms or on digs, but despite the fact that he'd had to put up with a simulation with a behemoth of a migraine, this one hadn't been so bad. At least this time, he concluded, watching Jack fiddle with a fluid bag, Teal'c unscrew a light bulb from an emergency light, and Sam place a basin within arm's reach, this time he wasn't alone.


	14. N is for Nasal Fracture

N is for Nasal Fracture

Jack groaned and touched his fingers gingerly to the space just below his nose, seeing stars. It came back covered in a sticky, wet maroon – a combination of the thick mud currently being lobbed at them and blood. His nose was definitely broken.

"Daniel!" The man in question acknowledged Jack's plea by speaking somehow louder and waving his arms in frantic gesticulations. Whatever he'd said in the sounds that passed for a local tongue seemed to have worked. The mud and rocks being slung their way stopped. The indigenous individuals sloshed back through the mud away from the gate and the team huddled in the sludge surrounding it.

"Well, that was fun. Let's go. Carter, dial it up." Jack watched his 21C roll to her feet and wade over to the DHD. He waited for some sort of argument from Daniel about the need to stay around and study the language and culture of the planet, but one look in that direction showed the man massaging what Jack guessed was a sore spot from a rock hit to the solar plexus. Teal'c, too, looked worse for wear, or perhaps that was just the effect of the giant gloop of sludge slowly trailing down his face from his golden first prime tattoo.

The kawoosh of the event horizon never looked so clean and inviting. With a backwards glance at the tree line for any sign of more mud and rock flinging, Jack followed his team through the open wormhole, relishing the look of surprise on Hammond's face as they squelched down the ramp.

"What happened, SG1? You can't have been gone 10, 15 minutes at the most." Jack tried to wipe the bloody mud on his hand off on his pants, but only accumulated more mud. Shaking a glob lose, he pinched the bridge of his nose and tilted his head back.

"Oh, you know what they say, General, what happens on PX whatever, stays on PX whatever." General Hammond's face wrinkled slightly and he surveyed them more closely.

"I take it the natives were not the most friendly." Swallowing the flow of blood that was now flowing down his throat, Jack winced.

"Not unless those were friendly muddy rocks, sir, no, they weren't. We got stoned and not in the fun way. Permission to report to the infirmary and showers, sir?" Hammond's face turned into a slightly bemused smirk.

"I wasn't going to say anything, colonel, but now that you mention it… Permission granted. Debrief at 1500. Dismissed." With a wave that sent a dozen droplets of mud spattering to the floor, Jack followed Teal'c and Carter to the elevator, loud squelching behind him promising Daniel's position in the rear.

They hit the showers first. While he knew his nose was most likely broken, there wasn't anything urgent about it that a shower would harm and, given the way the rest of his team was moving, Jack knew the detour wouldn't make any difference as far as a couple dozen bruises would go. The hot water felt incredible on his sore back and shoulders, but, despite trying to wash his face gently, even the spray felt rough on his injured facial cartilage. Spitting out blood from his nose and mud from his face, Jack finished up in the showers and donned a quick pair of BDUs, not looking forward to having his nose manipulated.

Daniel was lurking shirtless by the sink, trying to wash off the mud still caked onto the lenses of his glasses. Jack winced at the giant purpling welt of a bruise on his chest and a second, slightly smaller collection of bruises scattered along his ribs. Daniel made a similar face back at him.

"You okay?" Jack motioned at his chest and ribs. Daniel nodded, soaping up his glasses.

"Yeah. Glad we were wearing vests or I might look like your face. You heading to Janet?" Jack pat him on the shoulder, jostling him a bit and earning a grimace.

"Yeah. I'll see you there when you can see." Nodding absently, Daniel waved him on and Jack took off for the infirmary.

Unsurprisingly, Carter and Teal'c were already there. At times like this, they'd long put past the female only, male only regulations of the showers. There were stalls with curtains. Single team take over following returns from particularly messy missions were a gender-neutral affair and they'd timed things down to a science so there weren't any unintentional body sightings. Carter was always the first out, anyway, and Teal'c was a close second. Despite having more of him to wash, the Jaffa was fast, or perhaps he just didn't spend time enjoying the spray as much as he and Daniel did. Whatever the case, both of them looked nearly done with the post-mission medical routine. Teal'c had a nice butterfly bandage on his eyebrow, sure to put a damper on his possible facial expressions for the next 24 or so hours. With her BDU jacket off, Carter's left upper arm was a chorus of dark purple welts, but she was swinging it without wincing and doing a damn good job of persuading Janet against the need for an x-ray or cautionary sling.

Returning to the earlier position of pinching the only spot of his nose that didn't result in him seeing stars, Jack sat in a chair and leaned forward, letting the blood shift from flowing down his throat or dribbling on his lip to making a nice Jackson-Pollock between his feet. Just as he was thinking up the best way to make the bloodied pool into a pun on Daniel's name, Janet noticed him and abandoned the discussion about Carter's arm, click clacking over to his position.

"Colonel, you should have come straight here. That looks broken. Can I see?" Jack unpinched his nose and watched as the trickling drops became a more determined drizzle.

"And ruin your fancy furniture, doc? Ow." Janet had slipped on gloves and was pressing gently, but firmly on his cheekbones and forehead, moving towards his nose at the center.

"Ah, Jesus, doc, a little warning, would you?" The gentle touch against the cartilage of his nose had it giving way far too easily and the drizzle turned into a torrent. His Jackson-Pollock was now a puddle. So much for any pun-making with Daniel…

"It's definitely broken, colonel. I'd like to get an x-ray before we reset. Do you have any other injuries? Headache? Vision changes?" Janet's hands made their way through his hair, down his neck, and back around his jaw.

"Nah, doc, just the 'schnoz." Janet nodded, distracted by Daniel's arrival. He was walking gingerly and lowered himself into the chair next to Jack with the grace of someone with a badly bruised rib cage. He hadn't even bothered to put on the regulation black t-shirt, knowing that he'd have to take it off and how much moving his arms above his head to do so would make his chest scream for mercy. It looked like he'd shrugged his way into the BDU over shirt, holding it closed with the hand not holding his t-shirt till he got to the infirmary doors and then letting it swing open in all his bruised glory. Jack rolled his eyes.

"Really? You weren't off world for more than 20 minutes. That's got to be a record. I guess I'll order two sets of x-rays. Anywhere else I should be looking at, boys?" Jack smirked as Daniel muttered something about the planet not even having any interesting rocks and Janet, hands in the air in exasperation, walked back off to schedule the exams.

The debriefing that followed was blissfully short. Jack, a wad of cotton in both nostrils, had mumbled through the action in about two sentences. Carter, crossing her arms in a way that he knew was meant to hide certain soreness and perhaps the need for a sling, had confirmed his summary with a nod of her head. Even Daniel, shifting uncomfortably in the briefing room wheelie chair, hadn't been particularly verbose. Their reports were in and the team was sprawled around his living room, full of pizza and painkillers before the sun went down.

Daniel had found the only comfortable position lying flat on his back on the floor and had soon fallen asleep. Teal'c had similarly followed suit, sitting with his back against the armchair in deep kel'noreem. Jack had returned to the kitchen, grabbing a second round of beers for himself and Carter when she surprised him in the kitchen doorway.

"Your nose is bleeding again, sir." It took a moment for him to recognize what she was handing him. Before the gears in his head fully rolled into place, he'd exchanged items, the beer for the plastic wrapped object in her right hand, left arm cradled sore to the point of being useless against her chest.

"Uh… thanks?" Beer in one hand, foreign object in the other, Jack felt the blood pool down the right of his lip. Carter smirked at him.

"Do you want help, um, applying it, sir? I don't have any cotton balls on me and tissue won't do the trick in this case, I'm afraid." Jack looked down at the thing in his hands.

"Really, Carter? A tampon?" Carter let out a very undignified giggle and took it back, tearing the plastic wrapper and freeing the string-tied cotton wad from its applicator. He groaned. She was enjoying this too much.

"It's the best thing for blood flow, sir. Daniel and Teal'c are asleep. Just don't push it too far in. It'll expand a bit as it absorbs." Rolling his eyes and sighing, he took it back from her hand.

"I know how a tampon works, thanks, Carter." Biting his lip and cursing under his breath at the thought of what anyone would make of him, a full bird colonel, standing in his kitchen on a Monday night with a beer and a tampon in his nose, Jack sniffed the sludge of coppery red snot back and, with a look at his far too gleeful major, stuffed the tampon in his bloodier right nostril, careful not to dislodge any of Janet's taping.

"Thanks." Jack drank heavily from his beer, cognizant of the way the tampon string wagged against his face. Carter hid a snort of laughter in her own bottle. Rolling his eyes, Jack turned and headed for his back door.

"Moon's almost full. Going to be a good night up there for stargazing. You can come if you don't make me stick any more tampons anywhere." Letting out a laugh in danger of waking the other half of the team, Carter followed him up to the roof.

There was a saying he'd heard from somewhere, Jack mused as he watched Carter position the telescope and peer in the eyepiece, something like "all of us are living in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." He smiled, watching the grin grow over Carter's face as she focused in on a specific crater. They may have only been off world for a quarter of an hour, but it sure felt like they'd been through the wringer if not kicked all the way to the gutter and, as the saying went, it was a damn good night to be looking at the stars, bloody nose and tampons notwithstanding.


	15. O is for Otitis Media

O is for Otitis Media

It had started with a sore throat a few days ago, but she'd had more important things to do than to pay attention to than a bit of malaise. There was the naquada reactor research, sorting through the results of ongoing data collection from gate diagnostics, SG8 had found a fascinating new hovering device on their latest mission, and there was the upcoming mission to prepare for. Who had time to pay attention to a bit of a cold when all of that was on their plate? Sure, she was supposed to report anything medically pertinent to Janet and, yes, there was a 10 day symptomatic window for off world missions, but Sam knew that such a limit was only meant to act as a buffer against starting a massive plague by introducing any earth-based viruses and bacteria out into the galactic ecosystem. Reporting any symptoms would have marked her from the mission roster. SG1's latest mission was to a long deserted, Gou'ald warehouse full of technology. There was no chance of contaminating anyone who hadn't already been contaminated and there was no way she was sitting this one out.

At least, that was what she'd thought a few days ago….

Huddling more tightly into her BDU jacket and swallowing painfully, Sam shivered. Despite being surrounded by an endless sea of new weapons technology that could add up to the work of a lifetime, she felt miserable. The cold had taken hold with a vengeance. Her head was so congested, she could barely think. Swallowing was torture. The worst part of it all was her left ear. What had started as feeling like an annoying blockage from the congestion in her head had grown into a raging inferno of pain that beat in unison with her pulse. It made concentrating on the technology around her very difficult. Wincing as the warehouse spun dizzily, she sat heavily on a crate of Gou'ald flash grenades and tried to gather what was left of her strength.

Pausing in the count of Gou'ald death gliders, Jack cast a look over at Carter. She wasn't looking too well. He'd been keeping an eye on her since they'd gated into the warehouse yesterday. She'd looked a bit worn down and pale then. Now, the glassy look in her eyes and the zombie shuffle had him worried, not to mention the fact that she'd sat down on a crate and not gotten up for the past fifteen minutes despite being in what was a technological equivalent to a candy store. Sinking his hands into his pockets and trying to adopt a nonchalant expression, he strode over to her side.

"Carter?" She didn't respond, half closed eyes staring nowhere in particular. Ignoring the creak in his knees, he squatted closer.

"Carter?" As she sniffed, dragged a hand under her nose, and sighed, he realized that, despite being damn close to her ear, he was probably still in her peripheral vision. Even so, she should have heard him and definitely should have picked up on his presence. He got closer to her left ear.

"Ay! Major! Earth to Carter!" She nearly hit the ceiling she jumped so high, one hand flying to her P90 and the other to her left ear, a pained grimace on her face. Jack raised his hands till she dropped her weapon, feeling a bit guilty.

"At ease, Major." Growing somehow paler, she let the firearm swing back from its tether and swayed slightly. Jack frowned.

"What's going on?" He watched her wrap her arms around herself in a very Daniel-like parade stance while the gears turned far more slowly than normal behind her glassy, 1,000-yard stare. She was definitely sick. Jack kicked himself for not realizing sooner.

"You look like hell, Major. Talk to me." Military decorum and the look of embarrassment on her face was all that kept him from holding his hand up to her forehead.

"I… I feel like hell, sir, but it's just a cold. I'll be fine." Jack rolled his eyes and gave in to putting his hand on her forehead. The fact that she put up no resistance had his worry level ratcheting up a notch.

"You're hot." The words were out of his mouth before he realized their double entendre. Apparently despite her fever, Carter's brain was able to make the same leap and blush seeped into her fever-bright cheeks. He withdrew his hand and ripped his cap off his head, fussing with it instead of making eye contact. He was glad he'd sent Teal'c and Daniel off to the far side of the warehouse to gather inventory. There was no way they'd let him live that comment down.

"You know what I mean – you've got a fever, Carter. I'm sending you back to Fraiser." If she hadn't looked so sick, the way she crossed her arms and stamped one foot would have been a hilarious, mini-flashback to a toddler-aged, temper-driven major in miniature. The rasp to her protesting voice and the interrupting cough had him wisely holding his tongue.

"But, sir… We haven't even begun to put a dent in what's here. I mean, the implications of what could be accomplished with this row of technology alone…" Shaking his head, he put a guiding hand on her elbow and led her over to the DHD, still trying to argue through a coughing fit.

"Carter, it's all going to Area 51. Daniel, Teal'c, and I will catalogue it and let Hammond know how many trucks he's going to need. You're not missing anything. The only reason they sent us instead of the guys from Area 51 was because they weren't 100% sure this place wasn't booby trapped or guarded. We've already cleared it. Hell, we could hand it over to Area 51 right now. Go home. You'll see anything that needs your eyes on it back at the SGC." Punching in the IDC on his GDO as the event horizon whooshed into formation, Jack cast a look at her. She'd stopped arguing. In surrender, she looked utterly defeated and miserable.

"Feel better, Carter. We'll see you soon." He waited till she shuffled up the steps through the gate and the event horizon winked out behind her before he turned back to counting death gliders and radioed the situation to Daniel and Teal'c. As guilty as he felt kicking Carter back to the SGC from weapons technology Disney world, maybe this was really a blessing in disguise. There was no need for the frontline team to be the ones cataloguing a secure site, as exciting as it was to behold. Perhaps it was time to wrap it up and send all of them home.

Carter blinked as the gate room swum into existence before her. Hammond was at the foot of the ramp. His face shifted instantly from anticipatory readiness to concerned and almost fatherly as he gave her a once over.

"Infirmary, Major. Everyone else alright?" Throat hurting too much to speak and ear throbbing too much to listen, she nodded and shuffled down the ramp and off to the infirmary.

Janet was busy with other patients when she arrived. Wrapping her BDU jacket more tightly around herself, Sam curled up in the hard plastic chair by her office and waited.

"Sam?" Someone was speaking to her. She shifted, opening an eye and catching herself before she fell off her plastic perch. Janet was kneeling next to her, a concerned look on her face.

"I thought you were off world? What's going on?" Sam blinked. Janet stood and took Sam's wrist, checking her pulse. Sam cleared her throat and swallowed.

"I think I have a cold and my left ear might be infected." Still looking at her watch and counting Sam's pulse, Janet raised an eyebrow that would have put Teal'c to shame.

"Let me be the judge of that. Let's get you looked at, hm?" Janet led her over to a bed.

Bending down to undo her boots had her eyes swimming and a nauseatingly painful surge of pressure growing in her sinuses. Sam kicked them loose instead and curled up into the bed. Frowning, Janet stood beside her.

"When did this start?" The otolaryngoscope in her ear set off a tickling sensation that had her coughing too hard to answer. She felt Janet's stethoscope making its way around her back and chest.

"I'm going to guess you were feeling this before you left?" Knowing it was likely to send her friend into a rant, but caught in the lie of omission, Sam nodded. She zoned out as Janet rambled on about protocols and safety. Before Sam knew what was happening, the poking and prodding was over and she found herself being handed a prescription for what amounted to an ear infection and a sinus infection along with the stern lecture about pre-mission medical disclosure.

She drove herself home, crawled through a shower, and into bed. She slept fitfully. It seemed like any position she found either resulted in painful sinus pressure or a continuous flow of mucus down her throat that set off fits of coughing. As much as she was miffed to miss investigating the off world technological horde, Sam was thankful to at least be miserable in her own bed rather than some lumpy sleeping bag off world.

It was late in the afternoon of the next day before she spoke to another person. Janet had sent her home on a 48-hour medical leave with strict instructions to rest. An opened laptop on the coffee table spoke to an attempt to disobey, but the gravitational pull of the couch and blankets quickly lulled her back into a restless slumber.

The rattle of the back door, the rustle of a grocery bag, and the sound of boots in the hall had her jumping up from sleep, casting around randomly and knocking books from the coffee table.

"At ease, Carter. It's just me. Don't get too excited." Stiffling a yawn that turned into a cough, she pulled the blankets back up and shivered, sleep melting from her eyes to reveal the colonel standing in her living room with a bag of groceries.

"Sir?" Jack winced at the sound of her voice. Sending her home had definitely been the right move. If he'd thought she looked rough on the planet, she looked worse now. The cough sounded deeper and phlegm-y. Her nose was red, eyes underlined by dark shadows, and the bed head she was sporting gave an extra level of disheveled to her appearance. He fished around in the groceries he'd brought.

"Figured you could use a couple things. Here." Grateful and confused, she accepted the bottle of cough syrup and placed it on the coffee table. He set down a few other items on the table in front of her – a box of tissues, a thermometer, and a bag of cough drops – before passing through to the kitchen.

"I brought soup, too, but don't get too excited. It's in a can. Fraiser said I couldn't even add the famous O'Neill family secret ingredient. I bet you can't guess what it is." Smirking, he ruffled through her kitchen cupboard for a soup pan.

"Beer, sir?" A muffle "doh" answered from somewhere within a cupboard.

"Daniel's off world with SG8. They found some sort of Gou'ald treasure horde full of rocks and shiny things that rivals the one we were looking at on PX whatever. Teal'c's shepherding the Area 51 guys around, giving them pointers on how to store all the loot. I'm supposed to be filling out paper work about all of it, so… Soup's on." The sound of pots and pans moving around on the stove was comforting. Sam moved to get up, but the air outside of her blanket cocoon was much too cold and being vertical made her dizzy. Listening to the continued rambling of the colonel and readjusting the blankets around herself, she succumbed back to sleep.

When she awoke, there was a steaming bowl of soup in front of her. The books she'd knocked over were back in place and the laptop had moved back to its case. The colonel was asleep in a neighboring chair, a pile of paper work stacked in his lap. Sure, there'd been more important things to pay attention to than a bit of sickness a few days ago and exploring and cataloguing a Gou'ald technological treasure trove was exciting, but it really seemed she had all she ever needed right here.


	16. P is for Pseudocyesis

P is for Pseudocyesis

Acknowledging the panicked fear that she felt tingling every nerve in her body, wrapping its tether around her throat, and driving all the air from her lungs, Sam looked down at the tiny bulge in the flat of her stomach and the nightmare forming in the empty air in the center of her crossed legs, trying to control herself. This was not at all how she imagined this happening, not here light years away from home and definitely not this way. Sam closed her eyes, leaned her head back against the cool of the cell wall, and walked her way through the past few hours, grasping at a way for this not to be real.

They'd gated to the planet on a whisper of intel from a tablet Daniel had translated mentioning the existence of "the most prized treasure of Ra." The fact that the MALP footage had come back showing a village that seemed as full of cats as people should have been their first clue, but it had taken until they were surrounded by Jaffa with a cat ears symbol in the middle of their foreheads for Daniel to make the leap and the four of them to realize how deep in trouble they'd been. "The most prized treasure of Ra", as it turned out, was not in fact a treasure horde or, as the colonel had put it, a big honking space gun. It was, in fact, his daughter – Bastet.

They'd been horribly outnumbered. Surrender to escape later had been the only choice worth making. They'd been zatted, chained, and locked away in the most comfortable Gou'ald holding cell she'd ever seen. It looked more like a spa than a prison cell. There was a private bathroom enclave with a flushing plumbing system, en suite tub deep enough to soak in with water that tumbled hot and bubbling from jets like a Gou'ald jacuzzi, and the majority of the floor, with the exception of golden steps leading up to the bars, was a giant mattress covered in luxurious pillows. At first, she'd found the whole thing ridiculous and extravagant. Now that she knew its purpose, she found it sickening.

She hadn't been awake for longer than thirty seconds before the guards came for her. Stuck in the post-zat haze, she'd put up enough of a fight that they'd had to drag her forcibly up the stone steps. She'd caught the colonel's brown eyes before they'd had to knock her out, wordlessly promising not to tell them anything.

The next time she'd come to, she'd been strapped to a table in front of a woman who could have been Hathor's twin if not for the cat-like hairpiece. Eyes flashing, Bastet had identified her as a member of SG1 and, condemning the death of her father, held a ribbon device that glowed magenta against the exposed flesh of Sam's stomach. Pain unlike any she'd ever known had quickly had her blacking out again. She'd come to in the cell with Daniel, Teal'c, and the colonel anxiously hovering around her, their words and the physical changes rapidly playing out in her body worse than any nightmare she could have dreamt up.

"How're you doing, Carter?" She opened her eyes to find the colonel's concerned face hovering once again over her. She wrestled what she hoped was a smile onto her face. Given the colonel's wince in return and the way he pat her shoulder reassuringly, she guessed the smile had been more of a panicked grimace. It was accurate, then, at least.

"Tell me her words again – exactly." The colonel sighed and fell into a sitting position next to her.

"Carter, perseverating won't change it. We need to work on getting you out of here before…" Trailing off, he gestured awkwardly at her midsection. She bit her lip and crossed her arms, not letting that train of thought complete itself. As it was, everything was moving too fast. She'd already had to loosen her belt.

"Sir, my understanding of what she said suggests something that's not physically possible. I… I understand that there are… well, changes, for lack of a better word, happening, but… This is impossible, sir." Sam shut her eyes to hide tears which seemed all too quick to form in her eyes, no doubt due to hormones a small part of her brain supplied. She heard a shuffling across the cell. Daniel was returning from rummaging through a drawer of supplies.

"She made a long speech about the greatness that was Ra and how we would now feel her wrath. Then, she said that she had… impregnated you with the next generation of host that, like the Harcesis, would know the glory of the Gou'ald and, unlike the Harcesis, bring downfall to us all. She also said that, well, uh, it wouldn't take the usual amount of time for… That gestation would be quick, I guess." Sam opened her eyes. Daniel was wringing his hands and the colonel was staring a hole in the floor. Teal'c, who had given an exhaustive search of any and all potential escape possibilities, was staring down the door as if it would give through sheer mental pressure.

"I hate to say this, but it doesn't seem like a bluff. Given the midwifery supplies and the fact that this cell is more birthing suite than, well, cell suggests that it's built for such purposes. Well, all that and, well…" Daniel, like the colonel, trailed off and gestured at her midsection again. Sam looked down. The tiny bulge didn't seem as tiny as a minute ago, but perhaps that was just the effect of her ever-increasing level of panic.

"That doesn't make sense, though, Daniel. I wasn't ra… I didn't…. There was no exchange of genetic material. In order for me to be pregnant, I had to have, well, you know." Sam looked away from Daniel's pity, fighting to tamp down on the fear that was slowly turning into rage.

"I know that, Sam, but you said that she held something that was like a ribbon device but different against you before you passed out. Bastet was the Egyptian goddess of fertility. Believers would pray to her and make offerings in order to have children. It makes sense that she'd have some sort of device to, well… Hathor had all sort of devices for all sorts of things and we know that Gou'ald creating people is possible. I mean, take Cassie for example. And then there's the fact that things are progressing so fast, I mean, you've only been potentially pregnant for what, three hours? I'm no expert, but you look to be about 13 weeks along. You're starting to show." Hot, angry blush coloring her cheeks, Sam lowered her hands to the bump. God, it felt real. How could it be real?

"One trimester in three hours, Sam? That's roughly six more hours till labor and delivery." Sam heard the colonel curse quietly next to her and added a few colorful swear words of her own.

"Well, how do we know that it's going to end that way? What if it just, you know…. Like in that alien movie?" Sam decided it was best not to honor the colonel's question with a response. The glare Daniel was giving him was enough.

"This is just not possible, Daniel." Daniel knelt beside her and put out his hand.

"Come over here, Sam." Daniel took her hand and helped her to her feet. Standing made things all the more obvious. Her hips felt wider and her pelvis almost like it was at a different angle. She'd loosened her pants when no one had been looking and now they felt tight, despite her belt being practically undone and her pants as low as they could go. Trying not to put thought to what was happening – could it be nanites that would speed up gestation so much – she forced herself to pay attention to what Daniel was showing her.

"I'd like to try this, Sam, but I don't want to do anything without your consent." He was holding out what looked like a bizarre musical instrument, something with a pointed golden trumpet bell and a long hose leading up to a smaller golden horn.

"I think it's a Gou'ald equivalent of a stethoscope. I'm just going to place this on your stomach and listen." Not trusting herself to speak as the panic and anger coursing through her coalesced into a cold lump of dread, Sam nodded.

Daniel motioned for her to sit down and, with a smile that didn't reach his eyes, folded back her t-shirt. The bump looked bigger still, even more so now that it was out in the light. She looked past Daniel to where the colonel was whispering with Teal'c. He glanced their way, his jaw hardening and his eyes quickly darting anywhere else at the sight of her unmistakably pregnant belly. She looked back at Daniel, about to ask whether he heard anything when the sensation of something had her knocking his hand from her body and scrambling to her feet.

"Holy Hannah." Daniel was on his feet next to her and the colonel was across the room in a flash, a concerned expression on both of their faces.

"Sam?" Daniel put his hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off, blowing out a breath and placing her own hand on her stomach in confirmation, feeling the flutter again.

"I felt… I can feel… It's moving. Oh, god, this is really happening." She wanted to scream, to run, to force this somehow out of her body. Raw panic clawed at every part of her.

"Breathe, Carter, breathe." The colonel's face was in front of hers. She sucked in a breath and held it, feeling herself shaking. His hands were on her shoulders, trying to still the tremors of fear. Was this what Teal'c felt all the time? Was it a baby or a symbiote?

"We're going to stay with you through this, Sam. You're not alone. We'll be with you the whole time." Daniel was over the colonel's shoulders, determined blue eyes meeting her own. She shook harder, feeling tears start to trickle down her cheeks. Stupid hormones.

"This isn't how it's supposed to happen." The words escaped in a whisper. She felt the colonel's arms tighten around her, deepening into a hug. She stayed there, weeping embarrassingly into the crook of his arm for what felt like forever.

At some point, she must have fallen asleep. She woke on the pillowed mattress floor with a start, hoping somehow that the last few hours' nightmare had been only that. The bloated, sore, and heavy feeling confirmed reality before she even opened her eyes.

"Daniel?" she called, rolling groggily onto her side. Sitting feet away, he glanced over with a smile that seemed forcibly cheery.

"Hey there! Glad to see you're awake." Sam swallowed bile and forced herself to meet his eyes as she asked the question that had burned her into wakefulness.

"Daniel, is there… I wouldn't ask this, but… There are sometimes things people do to… Can we end this pregnancy?" Casting a glance to where Teal'c and the colonel knelt, whispering tactical plans among the pillows along the far wall, she almost missed the intensely sorrowful expression that flickered across Daniel's face.

"Uh… I thought about that. It's, uh… It's a little too late for that at this stage, Sam. I'm sorry." Daniel's squeeze on her hand had her looking down and what had become of her body had her nearly back into a panic. The bump, which had been noticeable prior to sleep, was the size of a watermelon. Feeling below the balloon of her belly, she realized that someone, she hoped Daniel, had removed her belt and secured her pants with a rubber band through the button loop. At least the shirt was somehow stretchy enough to fit. Running a hand on the nape of her neck, she realized the shirt was gaping at the neck. Someone must have put her in Teal'c's extra shirt.

"How… how long was I asleep?" She cursed the way her voice shook. Daniel glanced at his watch as if he needed the confirmation and then cast a glance at the colonel and Teal'c, fervently whispering a plan.

"You were out for a while. We've got… we've probably got an hour or forty five minutes give or take till… Till it's time." Breaking out in a cold sweat of fear and dread, Sam rolled into a sitting position, shifting to try and find a comfortable way to sit. It felt like whatever was inside her was thrusting up under her ribs and her back ached. Her chest felt heavy, her bra too tight. She grimaced and shifted again.

"Sam?" Daniel was giving her a nervous look. Sam raised an eyebrow and then, realizing where his train of thought was going, waved a hand at him.

"I'm not in labor, Daniel. I'm just uncomfortable. Maybe standing will be easier. Help me up." Grasping Daniel's hand, she squatted and rose slowly to her feet. Moving with a watermelon for a middle was hard. She felt unbalanced and slow. Escape at this point was going to be tough. Cantilevering her fists into the base of her back, she waddled over to where the colonel and Teal'c knelt, doing her best to ignore the expressions on their faces.

"What's the plan, sir?" The colonel stared back open mouthed. Teal'c's eyebrow rose. Sam heard Daniel come up behind her and fought the urge to be insubordinate.

"Sir?" The colonel shook his head, as if clearing away an image on an etch-a-sketch and pulled himself together, standing. Teal'c followed suit.

"We need a, uh, distraction to summon the guards. We've been watching. Teal'c and I think there's three keeping eyes on the cell. We'll get them in here, take them out, and make a break for it and get home in time for… How're you holding up?" Wincing as whatever it was moved in a very unsubtle way against her pelvis, Sam forced herself to look braver than she felt.

"I feel like a whale, sir, but I'll be fine. What's the distraction?" Daniel cleared his throat uncomfortably behind her.

"We, uh, we were thinking that maybe you could, uh, pretend to be in labor. Assuming this is supposed to be Harcesis 2.0 and our downfall, Bastet will probably want labor to end in delivery. If you're having difficulty, chances are the guards will either come in and assist or go get Hathor and to confirm that they need her, they'll have to come in and, well, they'd have been distracted." Unconsciously rubbing a hand over her bump, Sam sighed and shrugged. Her dignity was entirely gone by this point. What else was there to lose?

"Alright. What do I need to do?"

Daniel had coached her in Lamaze breathing, on what timing to pretend contractions were coming at to get the guards to come in, wet her hair to make it look sweaty, and helped her into a sitting position not unlike a curl up, knees bent and splayed. Teal'c and the colonel crouched in the shadows, ready to pounce as Daniel gave the signal. Doing her best to look pained and laboring, Sam let out a series of loud, convincing moans and Daniel called for help.

It worked like a charm. The guards came quickly, all three of them spilling in through the open gate right to her position. Teal'c downed one instantly before moving to a second with agile grace. The colonel had the third in a headlock before he knew what was happening and he was out in seconds.

"Great work. Let's go" the colonel called over his shoulder, peeking out into the hallway. Teal'c and Daniel took her under each arm and raised her to her feet before gathering what little gear hadn't been confiscated and moving to follow the colonel.

She was thankful they were otherwise occupied. The sharp clench of muscles near the base of her spine was surprisingly powerful and nearly took her breath away. She paused, breathing for a moment with the support of the wall before moving forward again. There was no time for this. Now was not the time to go into labor. Now was the time to run.

Teal'c was covering the rear. If he caught on, he didn't say. The contractions were few and far between and, luckily, seemed only to come when they stopped, crouching and listening for the approach of enemy Jaffa. They made it out of Bastet's base and into the trees lining the village before it became an issue.

They were crouched in the brush, listening intently. Night had fallen and the lights of the village were extinguished save for the torches glinting at the stargate in the far distance. One minute, she was listening to their whispering. The next, she was overcome by a contraction so forceful she lost track of the conversation. The only thing she could hear was a deep, primal groaning that seemed to come from the planet itself.

"Carter!" There was a hand over her mouth and arms around her shoulders holding her upright before she realized that the groan was coming from her. The pain stayed longer this time, opening and tearing from within. She fought to keep quiet.

"Jack, this is it. Sam's in labor. She's not going to make it to the gate." She opened her eyes, surprised at the terror in the colonel's eyes. In a blink, his special forces mask was back in place.

"Alright, then we do plan B. Daniel, you stay with Carter. Teal'c and I are going to scout the best way to the gate, take out the guards, and come back for you. We're getting her home if Teal'c has to carry her. Carter, breathe, alright. You got this." As she and Daniel nodded, Teal'c reappeared through the darkness.

"There is a cabin a short distance in this direction. It is deserted and a safer place to labor." Nodding again, she took the colonel's hand and rose to her feet, choosing not to mention the hot rush of wetness spreading down her legs.

"Alright, that's your job, then. We'll meet you there as soon as we can." With a nod, the colonel and Teal'c disappeared into the darkness at a jog.

She felt Daniel's hand on her shoulder, wordlessly propelling her onward in the direction from which Teal'c had come. The journey was slow. The contractions came in waves, forcing her to stop moving and wait them out, leaning against trees, crouched low against Daniel, or on all fours. By the time they reached the cabin, she was exhausted. Daniel coached her through them, whispering words she barely understood over the waves of pain.

Daniel shouldered the dark cabin open and helped her inside. There was a dusty looking bed she wanted no part of, an empty fireplace, and a stack of firewood. Daniel took the flint starter from his pocket and set about making a fire in the fireplace while she paced, pausing to ride out the more forceful ones against the wall.

"You're doing great, Sam." She was squatting now, hands and head braced against the wall and the deep, primal groan had returned. Absently aware of his presence, she nodded.

"Do you think we can get you on the bed?" She shook her head, tilting her pelvis and groaning. She was vaguely aware of her legs shaking.

"Don't want to lie down there." She felt Daniel's hands on her back, soothing her muscles. One hand went to her left leg, pausing when it came away damp.

"Sam, when did your water break?" She bit her lip, letting out a deep growl. Daniel waited.

"In the… when I stood with… with the colonel." She heard Daniel swear softly.

"You don't have to lie down, Sam, but I need to check, okay?" In the break between contractions, Sam felt a flash of embarrassment and anxiety.

"No, no, no, no, no, you are not looking there." She felt Daniel sigh deeply and his hands withdraw. When he spoke again, he voice sounded more tired than she'd heard it sound before.

"Sam, someone has to look. It's going to be me, Teal'c, or Jack and between the three of us, I'm the only one with any baby delivering experience. It's your choice, but this will be easier if you let me help." Arms and legs shaking, she nodded and felt Daniel's hands return to her back.

"Help me up, then." Moving slowly back to standing, they shuffled over to the bed. Sam couldn't reach to find the rubber band clasp of her pants. Blushing, she let Daniel undo them, grateful that the length of the larger shirt helped her feel a little bit less exposed.

"We can do this lying down or on all fours. What feels easier for you right now?" Blushing more deeply, she lay back in the bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to think of anything and everything but that which was happening at the base of the bed.

A sad smile on his face, Daniel's head reemerged from below the t-shirt hem and he removed his jacket to give her more covering.

"You're about 5cm, Sam. That's halfway there." Fingers clenching in the dusty bed linen, she felt tears prick her eyes and let out a choked laugh.

"Only halfway?" Daniel came to sit next to her, taking one hand. His expression seemed far away. Sam sighed.

"The last baby you delivered was Sha're's, wasn't it?" Daniel let out a deep sigh and brushed at his eyes. Sam squeezed his hand.

"When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a mother." Caught by the non-sequitor, Daniel gave her a curious glance.

"I thought you wanted to be an astronaut." Sam breathed through another contraction before replying.

"Yeah. Both. Wanted loads of kids, just didn't think I'd be having an alien baby. Do you think it'll look like ET?" The comment wasn't all that funny, but it had them in hysterics, crying and laughing through contractions till the colonel and Teal'c returned.

"The gate's clear, you good to move?" Daniel helped to re-secure her pants and they were off. With Daniel under one arm and Teal'c under the other, Sam practically had her feet off the ground. They were back by the DHD and through the event horizon before another contraction hit. Hammond took one stunned and slightly terrified look at her before ordering them all to the infirmary.

"She's what?!" Janet's exclamation announced her presence before the click clack of her heels revealed her behind the curtain. The shocked and disturbed face of her friend emerged moments later.

"Hey, Janet, got a bit of a situation." Sam grimaced as another contraction waved past. Either they'd slowed or it was so good to be back in the infirmary, she wasn't sure, but they didn't feel nearly as painful and scary as before.

"What happened?" Sam shrugged.

"Bastet is a fertility Gou'ald. I don't really know. Ask Daniel." Janet's hand was on her wrist, confirming that her pulse matched the monitors.

"Alright, let's get an ultrasound in here and a fetal heart monitor. I want to know what we're dealing with." A flurry of activity on the other side of her curtain and a surprised Daniel squawk announced both his presence and the arrival of the ordered equipment.

"Her water broke about 45 minutes ago. Contractions were every 5 minutes or so, now they're like every 10 to 15." Daniel's face, then his arms, and then the rest of him appeared from behind the curtain. Janet made a face and waved at him.

"Thanks for the information, Midwife Daniel, but you can't be back here right now." Daniel nodded and turned to go, but Sam pulled him back.

"He's seen everything at this point." Janet glanced at the two of them, eyes narrowing and then shrugged.

"When did this start?" Breathing through a rumble of a contraction, Sam let Daniel answer.

"Almost ten hours ago when we were taken prisoner by Bastet. Apparently, she has a device that impregnates people and speeds up gestation." Squirting the jelly on Sam and running the wand of the ultrasound machine over her abdomen, Janet shook her head.

"Yeah, I'll say. Only I'm not picking anything up on this ultrasound. Even if whatever was inside was in the birth canal, I'd still see something here." Janet wiped off the gel and listened with her stethoscope.

"And I'm not hearing anything. Get that heart rate monitor set up, please!" Janet stepped back to let the tech do his work.

"What do you mean? Sam's clearly in labor." Running a hand through her hair and looking between the two of them as Sam winced through another less forceful contraction, Janet shook her head.

"Yeah, I see that. I'm going to draw bloods for analysis. And Daniel, I'm going to do a speculum exam. I don't care what you've seen. Sam's getting her privacy." Nodding and squeezing her hand, Daniel slunk back out to the waiting area with the rest of the team.

An hour of waxing and waning-ly forceful contractions later, Janet stood next to Sam's bed, shaking her head. The woman was clearly in labor. Her progesterone levels were through the roof. She was dilated to 6cm, sweating, and exhausted. After the run of the mill exams, she'd let Daniel back in. His midwifery skills were a helpful, extra pair of hands. Sam was resting, holding those hands now, eyes closed and curled on her side. As far as she knew, the colonel and Teal'c were still in the hall. She didn't know what to tell any of them, let alone Hammond.

The fetal heart monitor hadn't picked up anything, nor had repeated ultrasound attempts. Short of exposing Sam and the potential fetus to x-ray or trying to get the laboring woman into an MRI or CT-scan, she had no idea what, if anything, was trying to get pushed out of her friend. Debating about whether to put Sam through a c-section, which would place her off the mission roster for months, or let whatever this was run its course, Janet fell back into her desk chair and stared at the picture of Cassie and the dog Jack.

That's when she had her eureka moment.

Jack the dog, as it turned out, was actually Jackie. Janet had found out a few weeks after Jack had given Jackie to Cassie when Jackie started to look thicker in the middle and her breasts started to develop. Suspecting pregnancy, Janet had taken the dog to the vet only to find that the dog was in fact experiencing canine pseudocyesis or fake pregnancy, a common condition in unsprayed females. The vet had given her a shot of testosterone and it had worn off. Janet had immediately had Jackie spayed and that had been the end of the story.

Janet turned towards the med room and considered the possibility. Pseudocyesis was incredibly rare in humans, usually the result of severe psychological trauma or psychosis, neither of which were most likely at play with Sam. The chance that this Bastet had the ability to create some sort of pseudocyesis condition was not too much of a leap given all that Daniel had rambled about with her fertility legends. However, if she was wrong, the testosterone was likely to drop progesterone levels and make a c-section the only other option if there were in fact a Harcesis child in there, somehow escaping detection.

Vial of testosterone and syringe in hand, Janet came to stand by Sam's bed. She was asleep. Daniel was nearly there, too, the adrenaline of the rush to escape and get to the gate and the length of the labor taking it's toll.

"Hey." Daniel's sleep-laden eye opened and fixed on her blurrily before he righted his glasses back in place.

"Hey." Janet smiled and held out the vial for him to see, explaining her theory and the pros and cons.

"Is it possible that there's not really a baby or an alien baby or anything but Sam in there?" Daniel frowned in thought. It hadn't occurred to him.

"I mean, maybe? God, Janet, I don't know. Everything's slowed so much since we left the planet. When we were there, I thought she was going to deliver right there in the forest. Everything was so fast. From the moment Bastet came in boasting to when we got here was only about ten hours, but it was all in there from conception to active labor. I don't… I mean it's cruel enough for a Gou'ald - go through the whole discomfort of pregnancy and the pain of labor and get nothing in return… She is the goddess of fertility and manipulating all that makes sense, but she did say that this would all be our downfall. I don't know. Is it possible that something on the planet spurred it on and now that we're away from it, it's all slowing down and wearing off? And that maybe we weren't supposed to escape and she would have just labored herself to death there? I really don't know. She's been in uninterrupted sleep for a while now. No contractions." Janet shrugged and nodded.

"If this job has taught me one thing, it's never to think something's impossible. Is it possible that there was something labor inducing there like oxytocin? Sure. I'm more worried about what's going to happen now." Removing his glasses and dragging his hands across his face, Daniel sighed.

"Janet, she's your patient. I only play midwife off world." Janet smiled.

"Well, in that case, I'm going to give her a hit of testosterone and see what happens. If nothing changes, it might be time for an exploratory c-section." A worried grimace on his face, Daniel watched the testosterone seep into Sam's IV.

The effect wasn't immediate. Daniel had fallen asleep at the bedside by the time Janet concluded anything definitive. Contractions had seemingly stopped. By the last check, Sam had shrunk in dilation to just under 2 cm. What had stopped Janet from calling in Doctor Warner for the exploratory c-section was the rest of her. With the testosterone swimming through her system, the mysterious baby bump had started to shrink. By the time Janet was ready to hand over her patients and head home, Jack and Teal'c were spelling the exhausted Daniel at the sleeping major's bedside and her stomach was back to it's usual shape.

Relishing the heat of sunshine on her shoulders, Sam watched Teal'c and Daniel play Frisbee with Cassie and Jackie. It had been Janet's idea. Two weeks ago, she'd thought she'd be holding a baby right about now, possibly one with the secrets of Bastet or one designed to destroy the world, but a baby just the same. The wailing cry of a newborn waiting in a stroller for its siblings on the swings made her jump, the deep, longing ache she'd so hoped to escape in this outing once again filling her chest.

"You'll be a great mom, Carter. It's just not your time yet." She hadn't heard him come up behind her. Smiling to hide the tears that threatened to form in her eyes, she made room for him on the bench.

"Save the world a few dozen more times. Take it from me, once you've got one of your own, the fate of the world could be hanging in the balance and it'll still be hell to leave them for work." She felt him squeeze her shoulder and leaned her head against his. It was a weird feeling. She hadn't wanted to be pregnant going into the mission. She hadn't felt remotely like settling down and starting a family. She hadn't wanted to be pregnant during the mission. The child wasn't even hers and it didn't really exist, but it still felt like she'd lost one just the same. Her body ached at the cry of the baby a few dozen feet away. She felt the colonel's arm tighten around her shoulders, aware of the wailing cry and its effects.

"Thank you, sir." Watching as Cassie and Teal'c threw the Frisbee back and forth over Daniel's head in the autumn light, Sam smiled into the colonel's shoulder. She may have lost an imagined baby, but she'd always have her family…

"Always, Carter, always."

…no matter what bizarre adventures they got up to.


	17. Q is for Quadriceps

Q is for Quadriceps

Despite keeping a calm, stoic exterior the majority of the time, Teal'c was no stranger to emotion. While the muscles of his face were well trained to hide the workings of Teal'c's mind through long years of learning under Bra'tac and in service to Apophis and his mind itself mostly functioned like a well oiled machine through the repetition of kel'noreem and similar years of practice in coping through countless adversities, Teal'c found the onslaught of emotions and his ability to cope through such mental battles had diminished since the loss of his symbiote.

During the many years when he had carried his prim'ta, Teal'c had always found himself able to squash down the fear that ripped into his concentration during the heat of battle. The writhing worm within fed on it, feasting on negativity and yielding energy and anger. He had relished the rage, riding the surge like a current of electricity. Even as he became a free Jaffa and served on SG1, that current of rage continued to hum, spurring him on with a relentless strength. Without his symbiote, Teal'c no longer had the luxury. Battles, war, and the feelings that went with them – pain, fear, anger, regret, dismay – could not so easily be brushed aside. In addition to the new mental burden his symbiote's loss created, his body itself felt more fragile. Like his Tauri friends, he now faced hunger, fatigue, illness, and weakness. When he was injured, it took time to heal.

Teal'c had been offworld with SG12 when he'd been struck. The native inhabitants of the world they were visiting had shot an arrow, thankfully not dipped in any poisonous substance, and it had lodged itself deep into Teal'c's right thigh. It had been painful. The wound was deep, cutting through his pants and flesh into the muscle Dr. Fraiser had called his quadriceps. Nothing had been severed. For that, he was thankful, but it required many painful stitches and he now found himself on crutches.

Shifting the bag he'd looped around his shoulders and inching forward, Teal'c felt a wave of doubt wash over him. Perhaps coming here had been a bad idea. Perhaps the metal crutches tensing at his weight would break. Perhaps the man wouldn't even be home and, since the airman who gave him a ride had already left, Teal'c would be stranded at Daniel Jackson's domicile.

Among his dearest friends in the Tauri, Teal'c knew of no one more adept at mental battles than Daniel Jackson. O'Neill was a worthy warrior as was Major Carter and both had seen more than their fair share of mental anguish. Yet, their tactics for facing battles of the mind were largely the same as those they used in the field. Teal'c did not find he had much to learn from his fellow warriors in that respect. Daniel Jackson, despite the battle skills he had learned over the many years they had been friends, retained the heart and the mind of a scholar. While the naïveté and "bleeding heart" O'Neill had described in Daniel Jackson had matured or been taught into some sort of submission by the experiences they'd had together, Teal'c knew that Daniel Jackson's way of coping with emotions was far different from O'Neill's.

Teal'c inched further up the walk and considered other possible failures to his mission. His leg throbbed. The candles in his bag jostled together. Perhaps he should not have ventured off base. Perhaps the candles would be broken and would not light. Perhaps Daniel Jackson would not appreciate a visit at this time.

Teal'c had intended to speak with his friend on base. He had been present when Teal'c had returned from the mission. Like the rest of SG1, Daniel Jackson had greeted his return and sat worryingly in the infirmary while the medical team saw to his needs. The man had not been on base that morning, however. A glance at the roster had revealed both that Daniel Jackson had called out sick and the reason for his absence – it was the anniversary of Sha're's passing, or rather, the anniversary of Teal'c's killing her.

Teal'c felt the weight of the cell phone in his pocket. He could easily dial the number for the SGC and have any random airman come and retrieve him. Doubt, guilt, and pain fought for dominance in his mind. He paused, nearly at the steps to Daniel's door.

Lost in thought, the opening of the door caught him by surprise. The man in question was leaning on the doorjamb. Upon first glance, he looked pale and unshaven, dark smudges lurked beneath his glasses, and he was holding himself in a way that didn't look all too steady. Perhaps he was indeed ill. It would do no good to remind the man of the date if he was already experiencing illness.

"Daniel Jackson." A tight smile echoed the arms he wrapped around himself at the sound of his name. He let out half a sigh and then stepped back to make room in the doorway.

"I, uh… I wasn't expecting visitors, but that's okay. Come on in, Teal'c." There was a deep, aching sadness to him, Teal'c noted as he approached more closely. The hand he dragged through his hair was quivering slightly. Teal'c crutched past him, realizing as he did that the man was still in the clothes he called his pajamas and, given the look of his dwelling, had most likely only just gotten out of bed. Given the way the ill man leaned heavily on the wall, Teal'c guessed he had probably intended to head back to sleep.

"I do not mean to intrude in your time of illness, Daniel Jackson. If you do not desire visitors, I will depart." Teal'c swiveled slightly and nearly lost his balance. He felt hands on his arm, steadying him.

"Did anyone bother to teach you how to use those? I've used them enough times to tell you you're going to end up on your face if you keep swinging them like that. Come sit down before you fall down. How's your leg, anyway?" Teal'c nodded his head in gratitude and redirected himself to Daniel's couch. When he was safely sitting, Daniel took the crutches from him and leaned them an arm's length away against the wall before falling into the remaining unoccupied couch space, closing his eyes and crossing his arms.

"You are unwell." Teal'c said it as a statement, not a question, though Daniel, opening one eye in his direction briefly before closing it again, interpreted it as such.

"Uh… yeah. Kinda, I guess. It's, uh… complicated." Teal'c was silent. This tactic often worked well with Daniel Jackson. Despite his talent as a listener, the man was often also compelled to fill empty space. It did not take much time before he spoke again, eyes still closed and curled into a ball facing away from him at the far end of the couch.

"I'm not… I'm not contagious. It's not a physical illness, really, it's just uh… I'm not… uh, well, yeah, I guess I'm unwell. I'm taking a kind of sick day… uh, it's uh…. I'm not up for saving the world or much of anything at the moment." The afternoon sun emerged from behind a cloud, bathing Daniel's forehead in a bright golden ray. Teal'c was overcome by a memory of a different sort of light.

"Daniel Jackson, I come not only to atone for the death of Sha're, but to seek your assistance." Daniel let out a sound that was halfway between a sob and a growl before rolling forward and putting his head in his hands, an expression of pain creasing his face.

"I can't, Teal'c, I can't today… please, just…. You don't have to leave. You can stay. I'm sorry, you just… I just can't today, Teal'c." Teal'c felt the earlier surge of guilt and doubt break over him. Mind nearly overcome, he thought through what others would do in his place. No doubt, O'Neill would proffer the Tauri mood and mind altering substance alcohol, most likely in the form of beer. Teal'c did not have any in his possession. Major Carter would most likely offer comfort to Daniel Jackson, perhaps through physical contact in the form of a hug. Teal'c's leg and the crutches now out of his reach rather hampered a smooth way of accomplishing that option.

Glancing down, Teal'c remembered the bag that now sat next to him on the floor. Keeping one eye on Daniel Jackson in case this was not the right course of action, Teal'c removed the candles and matches from his bag, lining them carefully along the lip of the coffee table. They were not many in comparison to the hundreds he often lit for meditation, but by the time they were lit, Daniel Jackson had raised his head and was staring, red eyed, at the display, a sad smile on his face.

"Will you join me, Daniel Jackson?" Wiping at his face, Daniel nodded and closed his eyes.

Teal'c led them on a simple beginner's meditation, not unlike the meditation they had practiced together all those years ago when Sha're's death was not as distant a memory. By the time they had finished, the sun had set and the flickering of the low burning candles were the only lights to be seen, save for the streetlights outside.

"Thank you, Daniel Jackson." In the dancing glow of the candles, Daniel smiled back at him. His gaze held less of a heavy sadness than it had before.

"No, Teal'c, thank you. You're a good friend, you know? I, uh… I'm sorry about before. Sha're… Since my memory's come back, not all… I had a dream last night, Teal'c, about Abydos and I realized that there's so much I've forgotten about them, about her, and I… It's still hard, Teal'c. It's really hard, you know?" Daniel Jackson's voice broke in the way Teal'c had come to realize entailed crying. He returned his gaze to the candles to give the man some privacy.

"You, uh… you did the right thing, Teal'c. She would have killed me. Amonet would have killed me. Share… You would have liked her, Teal'c. You two would have gotten along well. I, uh… I miss her." Teal'c glanced over at Daniel Jackson. His cheeks bore the telltale wetness of shed tears, but his shoulders, which earlier had been slumped in pain and grief, were straighter, stronger and, even in the dimness of candlelight, Teal'c could tell some color had returned to his face.

"Thank you, Daniel Jackson. As always, I learn much from you." Daniel Jackson sent him a curious expression before climbing to his feet and, with Teal'c's assenting nod, extinguished the candles and flicked on the overhead light.

As he watched the younger man wander about his dwelling, gathering beverages and offering to order pizza or Chinese food, Teal'c considered his friend's mental tactics. Unlike he himself had been trained, Teal'c did not see Daniel Jackson push aside emotions nor bury them to turn them from pain and grief to smoldering anger. Instead, he realized, watching the man pause and pass a solemn, caressing hand over the urn he knew held Sha're's ashes, he simply felt them, acknowledged the pain, hurt, and deep grief for what it was, gave voice to that which needed voicing, took the time he needed as he could to process what needed processing, and moved on, stronger and wiser for it.

While Teal'c had lost the prim'ta that had been his constant companion since the beginning of puberty what felt like nearly half a millennia ago, in the past seven years, he'd gained three different, far dearer companions. Shuffling the contents atop Daniel Jackson's coffee table to make room for takeout, Teal'c inclined his head in respect and gratitude. His leg still made it's wound known, but the doubt, the guilt, the fear, and the fragility which had swum through his mind, making his muscles tight and his stomach queasy, had stilled. Like the thoughts that passed through his mind while meditating, he had felt the emotions and, like Daniel Jackson, given them space and let them go. They would come again. When they did, like his wise friend fumbling with a pizza box, Teal'c knew what to do.


	18. R is for Recall

R is for Recall

Sometimes, things came back to him in fragments and shadows – a whiff of sandalwood, the way the sunlight struck him in the morning as the dawn streamed through the blinds and he rolled over and off the bed, onto the floor, as if his body, still fumbling between sleep and wakefulness, expected to encounter someone else, soft and warm with thick black hair and sweat-frosted, olive skin, mumbling his name with a lilt so tender and present to him that he could almost touch it, instead of the edge of the bed, the shrill shriek of his alarm, and the harsh wood floor of his reality.

Sometimes, Daniel remembered more in a déjà vu sort of way. He'd take a bite of an MRE around a campfire off world and know, quite suddenly and earnestly, that he'd tasted that taste before, smelled the ash of the fire, and listened to the laughter and banter of his friends next to him in the evening of a long day so many, many times before in so many, many places all over the galaxy.

Sometimes, it hit Daniel like a truck.

They'd gated to a planet that was supposed to be the opposite of exciting. It was an off week. Usually, this level of assignment would go to a newer team, one in need of more experience simply going through the gate, setting up camp, establishing a perimeter, checking the area, and gating back to the SGC to deliver their first report. Yet, the roster had all the novice teams on leave and, as luck would have it, SG1 had drawn the short straw, or so it had been explained. The insecure part of Daniel had wondered if somehow, in the planning of it all before things went the way they went, it had been meant as a sort of test to see if they could all still function together, given all that had gone on and all that Daniel was still struggling to remember, but no one would have planned for this.

Daniel had started to feel uneasy when they exited the gate. Something nagged at the back of his mind like a buzzing fly. Had he been here before? Was it just the way the light barely made it through the trees, shadowing the planet in eternal dusk? What was with the sinking, queasy feeling in his gut at the way the structure loomed up at them ahead in the distance?

It took one look at the tension in Jack's back to confirm that he wasn't alone in his unnamable aversion. A cursory look at his six revealed that Sam and Teal'c appeared unaffected. Daniel ran through a list of possibilities that grew in his mind as to why he and Jack might be the only two experiencing such a sensation.

Was something here reminiscent of that first Abydos mission? No, it was far too dark and dreary to have anything to do with the sunlit heat of Abydos.

Was it something to do with the plants like that mission long ago where they'd both fallen ill with awful headaches and utterly lost patience with one another? No, that seemed unlikely, at least insofar as this was instantaneous and that took a while to set in.

Was it something that had nothing to do with being off world, like the time he'd accompanied Jack to his cabin only to get dreadfully ill for the week or the time they'd gone on a road trip only to get two flat tires and be stuck, far from anywhere in a forest with only one spare and a deluge of freezing rain? No, those two experiences had been annoying and trying at the time, but, in retrospect, a rather hilarious endeavor that had contributed to many a good laugh and would not inspire the same level of existential dread.

Perhaps it was something he had yet to remember or something he'd rather forget?

Daniel should have remembered the instant they got to the main archway's gate. Jack's sharp intake of breath and the way his grip tightened to white knuckles around his weapon should have been enough, but the fact that the inscription above the gate was halfway broken off and barely legible had Daniel distracted.

"…Throne of the… something the Thunderer…?" Daniel saw all color leave Jack's face to be replaced by a thick layer of cold sweat and then it hit him, sending him staggering back against the ironwork of the gate like his feet had been swept out of them.

There in the shadowy forest, he could see Jack clear as day, slammed up against the metal spider web with acid burning its way through the skin of his chest, knives slicing through sinews, and falling head over heels into oblivion only to be revived again and again with the cruel, cold light of the sarcophagus – Ba'al, that was the name no longer on the gate. Daniel wanted to throw up. Where had that come from?

Jack was still ahead of them, silent, staggering slightly, holding his weapon tightly to hide shaking hands, though the faintest rattle of bullets in their chamber gave the movement away. Daniel didn't know what to say.

"Sir?" There was a crinkle of concern in Sam's brow, but it was clear that neither she nor Teal'c had yet placed the reason Jack was hightailing it into the shadows.

"Jack, wait up," he called, as Jack disappeared into the darkened structure.

"I guess Teal'c and I will secure the perimeter. Stay in radio contact." Daniel threw Sam a wave by way of response and hightailed it after Jack.

Jack was crouched in the dark next to the entrance to the inner sanctum. Daniel could just make out his outline in the near black of the hallway. It was more the sound of his labored breathing that gave him away.

"Jack?" Daniel got the front end of Jack's weapon to his face instead of a response. By instinct, he threw his arms up in a gesture of peace before realizing that Jack probably couldn't see him, probably wasn't seeing him, trapped halfway between the darkness of their current situation and the nightmare of the past.

"Jack, it's me. It's Daniel. Don't shoot." He couldn't see the gun move away from him in the pitch dark, but the tinny smell of old spent rounds was no longer as pungent and Daniel assumed he was no longer in danger. He slid down to sit next to Jack, careful not to make bodily contact.

"No one's here. It's empty. He's gone. There's no Ba'al, no Jaffa here. You're safe." He didn't get a verbal response, but something nearly imperceptible changed in Jack's ragged breathing.

"I…uh… I can't remember, but…. This feels different than before. It's empty. It's smaller. I think this is a, uh, a prototype. It's broken and decrepit. No one's here but us." He heard Jack suck in a long, low breath and blow it back out again, slowing and stilling his body. The rattle of his shaking hands ceased.

"We need to check." Jack's voice was a whisper, almost a question as if he was hoping Daniel could somehow promise omnisciently that they needed to go no further and all the speculations Daniel had so far uttered were true. Daniel bit his lip. He couldn't give him that.

"I'm here with you. We'll do this together." Extending a hand out in front of him, Daniel pulled Jack to his feet.

Groping and grasping in the darkness, they made their way blindly down hallways that felt forgotten and yet viscerally familiar. In the flashes of dusky light through cracks and crevices in the masonry, Daniel could see the outline of Jack's face, set in an all too familiar mask. Daniel swallowed against a lump in his throat and the crushing weight constricting his chest. Was this guilt? What was he forgetting? Why was this so familiar?

There were pools of dirty rainwater on the floor. Daniel thought about breaking out his flashlight, but reconsidered. He didn't want to see the details, have it all come back to him in the light of day. Then, it happened.

Stumbling, focused on coping through the walking nightmare as they entered what inch for inch looked exactly like Ba'al's torture chamber, Jack tripped. He caught himself somehow with one hand against the metal of an identical web. In one horrible instant, it all came rushing back to Daniel – the vision of Jack being tortured again and again and again and again and Daniel standing to the side, a silent witness, omnipotent, but powerless, guilty through complicity in the repeated, indescribably cruel death of his best friend.

This time, Jack was supporting him. The cold, slippery floor was rushing up to greet him through the dank dark. There was an arm around his shoulder saving him from a total face plant as he heaved, sobbing and spitting bile into the black rainwater.

"Easy, Daniel, easy. Breathe." He couldn't breathe. He was seeing it all again – the conversations in the cell, Jack begging him to end it, and the hours he spent watching Jack be tortured, contemplating whether or not to follow through, feeling more and more torn every passing moment between killing his best friend and having his blood on his hands or letting Ba'al continue, his best friend's blood on his hands through inaction, begging Jack to just give in and ascend.

"I've got you. You said it yourself – they're gone. I'm fine. I got out. It wasn't your fault. Breathe." As the flashback faded back into his nightmares, his stomach stilled and Daniel shrugged out of the support, shuffling to find his feet. Jack waited till he was standing soundly to step back and give Daniel back his personal space.

"I hate this place. No more exploring. Let's go," Jack called over his shoulder, leading Daniel back out. Daniel had never felt more excited to leave a ruin.

Sam and Teal'c were standing at the out most arch of the entryway. If they smelled the vomit, noticed anything off about the two of them, or placed the reason why both he and Jack were one hair shy of a visit to MacKenzie's house of fun, neither of them said a word. The walk back to the stargate was fast and silent. The debriefing was swift and the reason they'd pulled out and headed back early was glossed over with barely any mention.

As Daniel sat on Jack's couch with the rest of his team, a mug of spiced cider in his hands and watched a fire crackle merrily in Jack's fireplace, Daniel was hit with a whole other kind of recall, the kind of full body, environmental embrace that signifies complete acceptance, complete forgiveness, and total, unconditional love. It didn't matter what had happened, what he'd remembered, or what he'd forgotten. All four members of SG1 were safe and Daniel, in every meaning of the word, was home.


End file.
